I've been a fan of Eclipse for a long time now, even before FDT and Flash Builder were built around it. The use of workspaces, once you get your head around them, is powerful for focusing your head on the work at hand, keeping all associated projects within the one space.

However there are times when I wish I was able to have multiple workspaces open. And too the rescue comes the command line.

[Path/To/Eclipse]/eclipse -data [Your/Workspace/Dir] &

I've wrapped this up into a little bash script to start eclipse from either the current directory or using the specified directory as the workspace:

#!/bin/sh
if [ -n "$1" ]; then
	echo "Starting eclipse: WORKSPACE: " $1
	/Applications/eclipse/eclipse  -data $1 &
else
	echo "Starting eclipse: WORKSPACE: " `pwd`
	/Applications/eclipse/eclipse  -data `pwd` &
fi

On OSX it's better to use the open command, like:

#!/bin/sh
if [ -n "$1" ]; then
	echo "Starting eclipse: WORKSPACE: " $1
	open -n /Applications/eclipse/Eclipse.app --args  -data $1
else
	echo "Starting eclipse: WORKSPACE: " `pwd`
	open -n /Applications/eclipse/Eclipse.app --args  -data `pwd`
fi

This will work equally as well with the Flash Builder application, just replace the Eclipse.app with the path to Flash Builder.

Happy workspacing!

This one always gets me. Seems so difficult on OSX (Snow Leopard), so for all those who are trying to get https on the base install of apache(2) in snow leopard here are some tips.

Self signed SSL Cert generation in a terminal type:

openssl genrsa -des3 -out server.key 1024
openssl req -new -key server.key -out server.csr
openssl x509 -req -days 3650 -in server.csr -signkey server.key -out server.crt
cp server.key server.key.bak
openssl rsa -in server.key.bak -out server.key

The defaults are fine for a development environment, but of course you can enter in specifics if you need. I do recommend at least entering a common name (CN) though. You'll have to enter in a pass phrase in the first line and again in some of the subsequent commands.

Once you've run this you'll end up with the two all important files, the ssl certificate file (server.crt) and the ssl certificate key file (server.key). You need to point the apache configuration to these files.

sudo vim /etc/apache2/extra/httpd-ssl.conf

Find and edit the two lines below, to point to the files you generated above:

SSLCertificateFile "/private/etc/apache2/server.crt"
SSLCertificateKeyFile "/private/etc/apache2/server.key"

Next check that the mod ssl and ssl configuration is included in your apache configuration:

sudo vim /etc/apache2/httpd.conf

And check the following lines exist and aren't commented out:

LoadModule ssl_module libexec/apache2/mod_ssl.so
Include /private/etc/apache2/extra/httpd-ssl.conf

And finally you'll need to restart apache to get the new configuration loaded.

sudo apachectl restart

And that should be it, you should now be able to browse to https://localhost/. As it is a self signed certificate expect to click through a few warnings.

Happy SSLing.

Here we'll show you how to move the present working directory of a Terminal window to the current directory in the front most Finder window.

I'm sure you're aware of the terminal command

open .

which opens a Finder window in the current directory of your Terminal window. And of course there are equivalent plugins to open a terminal window from finder:

• Open Terminal Here
• cdtop

Both of them allow you to place a Finder Toolbar button to open a Terminal window.

But my new favourite is a script that changes your present working directory to that of the front most Finder window. Thanks to users at stackoverflow for this. This rocks for jumping around the file structure, especially if you've just browsed somewhere through finder and need to run a script in the directory.

Drop these functions into your .bash_profile using vim or other:

function ff { osascript -e 'tell application "Finder"'\
	-e "if (${1-1} <= (count Finder windows)) then"\
	-e "get POSIX path of (target of window ${1-1} as alias)"\
	-e 'else' -e 'get POSIX path of (desktop as alias)'\
	-e 'end if' -e 'end tell'; };\
 
function cdff { cd "`ff $@`"; };
 

Then you can type cdff to change to the front most finder directory. Awesomely powerful!

Happy Terminaling...

As anyone who knows me would tell you, I live by the command line, so I thought I would share an old trick to compile as3 applications from the command line in bash.

The trick here is to use the Flex SDK compiler which is available free from Adobe. It also requires having installed java, which is so common on most machines that I won't talk about installation.

The setup process is fairly simple:

• Grab Flex SDK: http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Flex+SDK
• Extract to a location, eg: ~/.flex
• Make executable: chmod +x ~/.flex/bin/compc ~/.flex/bin/mxmlc
• Add the location to your path in .bashrc: PATH=~/.flex/bin:"${PATH}"

Once that's done you should be able to type mxmlc into the command line and see an error stating you must specify a target file. To compile an as3 file simply use the following:

mxmlc main-app-file.as -o output.swf

Additionally I compile my libraries to my-libs.swc by doing the following:

compc -source-path . -include-sources . -output my-libs.swc

Since this is a flex compile you can also use flex syntax in your actionscript to embed resources in the code. Most commonly I use the swf definition line below to simply definite the frame rate and dimensions of the compiled output.

[SWF(width='990',height='680',backgroundColor='0x000000', frameRate='30')]

Now to use Flash CS3's V3 Components see this post: moock.org

Additionally there are Eclipse tools for actionscript: the rasx() context