On 11th of November I had my 22nd birthday in a wonderful Greek island of Poros!

Visit the photo set on Flickr.

What a wonderful piece of software!

This was my final impression about Powerflasher FDT 3.0 after trying it out in live production environment for 10 days.

A lot of the quality can be explained by the fact that Powerflasher GmbH, company behind the product is based in Germany. You can simply feel FDT radiating with quality – interfaces are polished and easy to understand, code completion works as you would like it to and the configuration is extremely simple – yet gives you unprecedented power of control over the look and feel, templates, snippets, fully customizable Code Formatter and Live Code Generation feature.

In comparison to Adobe Flex Builder 3 which I use for doing most of the open source Actionscript 3 work – FDT 3.0 is a very (read VERY) appealing alternative boosting your IDE toolset by 34 new and competitive features.

For a moment I still thought that FDT will fail when I’ll try it on a real task. So to prove myself wrong I decided to do a little test and to write a simple chunk of code consisting of 3 classes and 40 functions from scratch on both of the tools. The results were very impressive – just by typing in the same text on both IDEs FDT 3.0 code completion saved me over 30 minutes.

All in all I think this is a great tool with a competitive price tag.

And if that was not enough – If you take part in any kind of open source Flash development, you can apply for a FREE version of FDT 3.0 enterprise (thats how I got mine!), just fill in this form.

However – some improvements could be made speeding up the debugging process. I believe this is possible by caching the Flex 3.0 SDK modules in Eclipse’s memory, but any tips on how to do that correctly would be a really nice addition.

Have you tried FDT 3.0? What are your impressions?

Hey,

One of my recent buyers at Flashden asked to do some modifications to my original 3D Bookshelf for his new website http://www.boek.net/ . Yesterday the website went live with my widget at the very frontpage and it’s looking great!

Check it out at http://www.boek.net and let me know if you like it.