Eclipse offers the possibility to target browsers. Simply go into the preferences of Eclipse, then into the "General" section, and then into the "Web Browser" subsection. You can next check the "Use external Web browser" to use a browser that is not part of Eclipse.

If your browser of choice is not on that list, you can click on "New" to add another one.

For example, I add Safari here. I selected the application from the "Applications" folder, however I got this:

That is quite baffling... I did as I usually would by selecting the Safari.app file, and got an error. I will be honest, I have no idea if this occurs on Windows, as I do not have access to that OS anymore.

I decided to try something before I googled for anything. I decided to go into the package content of the application.

If you are not familiar with this, know that in Mac OS X you can right-click onto an application and select "Show Package Contents". This will present you the files that make up the application. The actual application file can be found in the "Contents/MacOS" folder.

Now, you cannot do all that from the Finder window that opens when you browse for files from an application. I believe that in this regards, Windows is better, since you actually have access to all the functionalities of the File Explorer even when browsing from whithin applications.

So, where does that leave us? Well, then the idea is to get the location of the file outside of Eclipse. You can always get such a location by dragging a file into the Terminal, or even into Spotlight. Then copy that location and paste it in the appropriate field.

There you go, multiple browsers are now available to you!

Let's backtrack a bit. My OS is in French, as I am French Canadian. Whenever I use software that requires that I write (namely MS Word, but also utilities for emails, etc.), I want my software in my native language. However, in the case of programming (and that actually goes for Adobe's Creative Suite as well) I want my software in English. A simple matter of aligning more properly with a lot of tutorials online.

As stated in my previous post, I use Eclipse to program, and my setup is in English. After installing the Flash Builder plugin, I ended up with Eclipse's UI switched to French. Erh... what gives? During the process of installation, I did not chose French at any point.

I uninstalled and reinstalled Eclipse and Flash Builder a couple of times to see where I had gone wrong. Nowhere.

The answer came from a similar question asked on the Adobe forums. The explanation given on the forum is for Gumbo, here is a translation for Eclipse:

1. Exit Eclipse and open the finder and go to the Eclipse install directory
2. Right-click on Eclipse and select "Show Package contents"
3. Navigate to Contents > MacOS
4. Edit Eclipse.ini in TextEdit
5. Below the line "-vmargs", enter "-Duser.language=en" and then "-Duser.country=CA" (or "-Duser.country=US")

The guy on the forum seemed to have the wrong language installed, so instead of asking him to uninstall and reinstall Flash Builder, the Adobe employee suggested this option. Fair enough. However I do not understand why I had to go through the same steps when I decided to install the plugin in English. Why has the plugin decided to take my OS language rather than the one I chose during the installation? As James Paterson says, Flash is surrounded by black magic!

I've been thinking of what to write for my first post, other than "Welcome to this blog". I realized that since I intend to share my work habits and to make some tutorials out of what I have learned the past few years, I might as well present how I work.

I have tried different ways of writing ActionScript over the last years: the Flash IDE (not really efficient), FlashDevelop (is a good start), Flex Builder and finally Eclipse. Ok, the last two are actually the same. Here is why I am now using Eclipse to write my ActionScript projects, and sometimes even other projets.

The Flash IDE is a great visual tool as it merges some parts of Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects and a code editor. However, try as you might, you can be good at a lot of things, but rarely can you master them all. The code completion in the Flash IDE is less than optimal, I haven't found a way to create snippets and honestly, it's missing many customization options.

FlashDevelop is great. Honestly. But you have to have a Windows system. Ever since I bought my MacBook Pro, I don't have that anymore. Sure I could install Parallels, but I think it's a lot of time wasted in an efficient workflow.

When I started at Sid Lee, I switched to Flex Builder since this is the tool used there. At iCongo, where I worked previously, we were using Eclipse, so I kind of got used to that workflow. After Flash Builder's (or Gumbo's) release, I struggled with some bugs and decided to move back to Eclipse.

I now use Eclipse 3.4 with the Flash Builder 4 plugin. I prefer Eclipse to Flash Builder as the base IDE since Eclipse already includes an XML and HTML editor. Another huge... ok, let me rephrase... HUGE advantage that Eclipse has over FlashDevelop is the fact that Eclipse has a plugin for dealing with SVN, which I think is crucial for teamwork. Oh yea, you can install TortoiseSVN on your machine and deal with SVN separately from your code, but let's face it, that offers more chances for your team to mess the SVN flow.

So, to sum it up, I added the Subclipse plugin to my Eclipse setup.

I also added the FlexFormatter plugin, which allows me to format my code automatically the way i want. Quite useful when you are a neat freak like me.

When working with Java developpers at iCongo, I have seen that they had a tab for tasks, which I found useful. When I code, I may not want to write all the code at once, so I need to sprinkle some reminders along the way. The TODO and FIXME tags are quite useful in that sense. The Flex Builder 2 task extension does just the thing!

Finally, since I started to edit my WordPress blog, I added a PHP extension to my Eclipse.

If I was only work oriented, that would be sufficient. But I like my work environment to look great. I remembered three articles that Lee Brimelow wrote about making your Eclipse look better (Pimp my Eclipse part 1, part 2, part 3). There is a lot of stuff from his articles I did not use, but that could be useful nevertheless.