The ActionScript Editor Developer's Challenge is in effect now, and already the stakes have been raised: Shane Caraveo of ActiveState has donated a full license of Komodo IDE (a $295 value!) to the top vote-getter who uses the company's open-source OpenKomodo platform to create their entry.

This is great news, and we welcome ActiveState's participation in this. The latest version of Komodo already has ActionScript 2 parsing using MTASC, and we can't wait to see what the open-source development community can do with ActionScript 3!

Remember to sign up in the Developer forums before March 15, and get your entries in by April 15. Official rules are available in the forums.

OK, I'm tired of waiting: It's time to buy everyone a good ActionScript editor, and I've decided to foot the bill just to get things done already.

As you may have noticed during the last few months, I've spent a great deal of time customizing, expanding and generally bending the will of the jEdit text editor to make it do things my way (which, coincidentally, is a lot like the FlashDevelop and SEPY ways I learned in the Windows world). For the most part, I enjoy coding with jEdit, and it's almost the perfect cross-platform, multi-language editor. Unfortunately, I have neither the time nor the Java experience to attain the one feature that I miss most from my days with FlashDevelop: Code completion.

It's a simple feature I thought was silly when I first used it, but man, has it saved me time over the years (preventing typos, providing quick hints of little-used function parameters, etc). Thus, jEdit — along with every other Macintosh and cross-platform AS editor outside of Eclipse — remains a second-class ActionScript editor for me today.

So as of tonight, I've decided to remove my developer's cap and instead take on the role of small-time benefactor: Thus, I will personally award $300 to the developer (or team of developers) who creates the best cross-platform ActionScript coding plug-in for one of two editors by April 15.
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