Our contest to create a truly cross-platform ActionScript 3 editing tool came to a close last month, and a lot of you should be kicking yourselves right about now:

Thanks to an overwhelming response of exactly zero (0) submissions, it turns out that any one of our reader(s) could have entered a dead tarantula as their sole entry, and we'd have been forced to hand over the $300 prize money.

In fact, it could have been more — although we received no entries, we have actually been inundated with offers to "sweeten the pot" for the winning entry: First the kind folks at ActiveState ponied up a free license of Komodo IDE to the winner, and then several others came forth asking to help enhance the prize pool with cash donations and other goods.

Unfortunately, the actual contest results were abysmal — not a single entry submitted before the deadline, and no word from anyone registered as to whether they made any progress whatsoever. On the plus side, I did discover that running an open internet forum for developers may in fact be the best way to attract robots selling porn, home mortgages, porn and, um…. porn.

My guess is that we targeted the wrong audience with our call — we spoke to traditional Flash developers (who truly want the tool), rather than the Java or Mozilla-platform developers who are more familiar with the APIs and libraries necessary to produce it. At this point, I'm considering making this a "standing prize" and reaching out further to the open-source development community, but for now, my own work schedule makes it difficult to devote too much time to the cause (especially as I'm slowed down by sketchy ActionScript development tools on my platform of choice.

I'm up for suggestions on how to proceed, though, and I'm confident that eventually, we'll have what we need in terms of a strong, platform-independent ActionScript 3 editor (without the overhead of Eclipse). While I'm partial to the aging but bendy jEdit myself, I can't help but think OpenKomodo might be the "next big thing" — especially since it shares its Scintilla-based roots with FlashDevelop, SEPY and the (I think now defunct) SCiTE|Flash of Windows fame.

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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Check out more recent articles to see how I stopped worrying and learned to love the Stacks.

I've been enjoying my first few days with the new OS X 10.5 operating system (aka Leopard), and I'm really looking forward to seeing what the development community is going to be able to do with the hundreds of cool new features and API hooks built into the OS. But that said: Does anybody really think that the "Stacks" feature has been well implemented in Leopard?

I was actually looking forward to using Stacks: Along with Time Machine (which it turns out is currently useless on my existing network storage system), it was one of the things that drew me to buy the latest upgrade as soon as possible. But it turns out that "stacks" are just folders — not smart folders, and not "on the fly" collections of files. Just folders. And really, really, really sh*tty looking ones, at that.

What the hell are these supposed to be? I challenge anyone to identify these folders!

I won't go into details here, as I'm sure anyone looking for more info will find it in abundance elsewhere on the Web (The entire Ars Technica review is a great read, by the way).

In fact, Leopard is indeed a great system, but the two main things that Apple has been using to promote it to the masses — Time Machine and Stacks — have turned out to be sorely disappointing. I'm sure somebody will figure out a way to get Time Machine to work on a networked drive soon enough, so I'm not actually worried about that one. After all, we've already seen "fixes" for other features, such as this fix to disable the miserable 3D Dock.

But Stacks? Stacks just sucks.

It's not like me to obsess over something I cannot have (OK, so it's exactly like me to obsess over something I cannot have), but lately I've been whining that a hard-copy language reference has yet to be published for the now well-established ActionScript 3 language. Apparently, other developers have also been waiting for such a book, and today I finally decided to do something about it.

But good lord, what have I actually done?

Behold the 2,603-page ActionScript 3.0 Language Reference (and for comparison's sake, its puny 1,028-page ancestor, the ActionScript 2.0 Dictionary):"

Yep, it's the entire Language Reference — compiled and pulled from the Flash CS3 help files with the help of a custom script — and it's freaking huge. I now understand the reluctance on the part of commercial publishers: This thing is unwieldy at best. Using almost three reams of 20-pound copy paper (front and back), two 800-sheet three-ring binders and a vast majority of the stock toner cartridge in my new Brother HL-5250DN laser printer (which rocks, by the way — full duplexing for less than $200), it took way more time and effort than any sane person should spend on such a project (And sadly, I'm not counting the time I spent writing Perl code to format the pages more to my liking before pouring them into Adobe Acrobat Professional for final compilation into a single volume).

Unlike past versions of Flash, I don't think anybody can complain that the documentation hidden away in the online help files of Flash CS3 is incomplete. If it is, I'm not even sure I care.

So now that the papercuts are healing and the hole-punch confetti covers my workdesk, you're probably wondering: Will I ever actually use this tome in my daily workflow?

I'd like to believe I will, simply because I have to think I was justified in compiling it. But on the other hand, now that I've got the whole thing out of my system, there's something telling me a guy could get accustomed to this new-fangled, online HTML language reference, after all.