Thursday, August 26, 2010

Got Tilde?

Since I've just re-designed my personal blog, I figured that I'd kick it off with a word on the Tilde Console.

I launched the Tilde Console open source Flex project back on June 18th and though I've done my best to spread the word and it's been mentioned on The Flex Show, I have yet to hear from a developer who is using it. I wouldn't say that it's disheartening, since Tilde is immensely useful to me personally, but I do think that people are missing out on an invaluable Flex development tool.

If you program in Flex, you should definitely check it out. Tilde is built primarily from highly-optimized PushButton Games engine code and is packed with powerful debugging tools including (but not limited to):

Developer Console
  • A versatile "tilde-activated" console similar to that found in many 3D games engines (e.g. Unreal, Source, etc.)
  • Provides tab-based command auto-completion, command history and built-in help
  • Powerful ability to register custom call-back commands at run-time. These are treated identically to the built-in commands.
  • Utility functions for serializing object information to the console
  • Integrated "Hi-ReS! Stats" from Mr.doob

Client-Side Trace Logging

  • Statements are logged to both the console and the Flash Player debugging trace.
  • Multiple logging-levels are supported and entries are color-coded by severity in the console. (e.g. DEBUG, INFO, WARN, ERROR)
  • Logging verbosity can be set using a simple console command.
  • Deferred logging: even if log statements are sent before a Logger instance is created, they will be stored until one does exist, allowing log entries to be submitted from the moment the application starts.
  • Explicitly turning off logging causes all logging calls to be disregarded so they don't impede application performance. (All pending deferred log calls are also discarded.)

Click on the image below to launch the demo in a new window. Once you've tried it out, please let me know what you think and check out the source code at the Google code project. I'd love to hear from people who are using it, so don't be shy!

Oh, and let me know what you think of the new blog design. All graphics were done using free tools: Inkscape and PSPad.



2 comments:

  1. I recently used the TildeConsole to help me debug a nest of GUI-interaction-dependent sound-loading/playing code. It really helped cut out that extra step of switching to a separate console or debugger window every other second.

    If your code behavior intentionally changes when flash player goes out of focus, then an in-player tracer/debug-inspector like TildeConsole will be a great aid in successfully inspecting an interaction flow from start to end.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I discovered this today, and all I can say it's that's great!
    Thanks for share this!!!

    This is the best tool to 'force', easily , the developers to get best practices

    ReplyDelete