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?

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 17th, 2007 at 11:22 pm and is filed under Actionscript 3, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.