The project is off to a slow start — at this point, the computer still doesn’t boot.

Regarding motivation to get started implementing a product idea once you have one:

Whatever you do, do something.

Us programmers, we tend to overanalyze things. Lots of up-front design, trying to decide if it’s the right thing to do, not sure if we have enough education yet, etc. But from what I’ve read about successful entrepreneurs, they are DOERS. They’re Action-Oriented.

So I’m inventing a new term:

Action-Oriented Programming: writing the damn program instead of thinking about writing it.

• The trunk directory is where active development is taking place on Flex 4 (codename Gumbo). Start there if you want to track Flex 4, contribute patches, and so on.
• The 3.0.x directory is where Flex 3 is kept.  This is a stable branch that will only be changed if there are patches to Flex 3. Start there if you want to play with or modify the Flex 3 source.
• In the rest of the bullet points below, any directory I mention exists as a subdirectory of both the trunk and the 3.0.x branch.
• The entire source of the compiler is in there. This includes two main parts: mxmlc (in the modules/compiler directory) and asc (in the modules/asc directory). asc is the lower-level component that parses and compiles ActionScript source code; mxmlc is the higher-level component that parses MXML files, calls asc to have it compile ActionScript, hooks up binding, invokes the linker, and so on.
• One of the coolest parts is swfdump.  As Gordon explained, this gives you the ability to see exactly what is inside a swf. This is a great learning tool for understanding what really goes on in the compiler and in your own code. Try “swfdump -abc myapp.swf > myapp.txt”, and then start exploring.
• The entire source for the command-line debugger, fdb, is all there, in modules/debugger. For the starting point of the command-line debugger, see DebugCLI.main(). For the entry point to the generic debugger API — upon which both fdb and the Flex Builder debugger are built — see Bootstrap.sessionManager().
• In the “development” directory, you will find Eclipse projects for most of the projects. There is no project there for asc, but there are projects for mxmlc, fdb, swfutils (which has the source of swfdump), and so on. The projects are divided into two groups: The “java” directory contains Eclipse JDT projects for the Java-based parts of the Flex SDK, such as the compiler and the debugger, and the “flex” directory has Flex Builder projects for the Flex-based parts of the SDK, such as the Flex framework. To use these, follow two steps: (1) in the preferences, in both General > Workspace > Linked Resources and Java > Build Path > Classpath Variables, set FLEX_SDK to point to the root directory of your SDK; (2) do File > Import, Existing Projects into Workspace.
• Flex Builder 3 supports not only Flex 2 and Flex 3, but, in fact, it supports any custom Flex build you care to make.  Drop in your own hacked compiler. Drop in your own hacked framework.swc. Drop in a patched flex-config.xml, and watch projects that use that SDK automatically pick up the changed library path. To make Flex Builder “see” your SDK, just go to the Eclipse Preferences, and then Flex > Installed Flex SDKs, then click “Add…” and point to your SDK’s root directory.
• Don’t forget that the entire Flex bug database is out there for you to see — search for info on existing bugs, vote for bugs you want to see fixed, log bugs, suggest enhancements.

But dragdropupload is a slick little Firefox extension that addresses this problem. Once you install it, you can drag and drop any file from your computer on top of the words “Attach a file” in Gmail. Sweet! (You can also drag and drop onto any other website that does file upload, but Gmail is where I find it most useful.)

What the?!?

So of course I clicked ‘em all. “Wikipedia:Hauptseite” and “Accueil” take you to the home pages of the German and French versions of Wikipedia, respectively. “Tirol” takes you to the German-language page describing Tirol, which is apparently “a historical region of Western Central Europe” (according to the corresponding English-language page). The last three links take you to the English-language pages for the movie Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Denzel Washington, and commodity markets.

Hierarchical variables view.

Reduces clutter in the Variables view by grouping all superclass members in a separate tree node, so by default you only see the members of the current class.

Much faster single-stepping.

Previously, if any variables such as “this” were expanded in the variables view (so that their members were visible), then single-stepping in the debugger was somewhat slow. It is now much, much faster — in fact, single-stepping with variables expanded is just as fast as single-stepping with variables collapsed. In one quick test I just ran, single-stepping in Flex Builder 3 was twenty times faster than in Flex Builder 2. In Flex Builder 3, I can just hold down F5, and even on a slow machine, it is executing about ten single-steps per second.

No more “Where is the debugger” dialog.

Now when the Flash player runs a debuggable application (swf) but can’t find a debugger, it just runs the app, with no annoying dialog. (If you want to force it to prompt for a debugger, do right-click > Debugger on the swf running in the browser.)

No more separate debug swf in your bin folder.

Flex Builder 2 created YourApp.swf and YourApp-debug.swf — and also YourApp.html and YourApp-debug.html. Flex Builder 3 no longer creates the "*-debug" files. This speeds up compilation — Flex Builder only has to create one swf — and greatly simplifies writing code that has to refer to other swfs by filename.

In Flex Builder 3, the files in the “bin” directory are debug files. (Before we ship, we will probably rename that folder to “bin-debug”.) To get the release files, use the Export Release Version command, which creates a separate “bin-release” directory. There are more details in this blog post and in this video.

While listening to podcasts:

• “back up” or “repeat” to back up a few seconds
• “pause,” “play,” etc.
• “faster,” “slower,” “normal speed”

Email:

• iPhone reads the email to me
• “next message,” “delete message,” etc.
• Dictation, a la Dragon NaturallySpeaking.  Okay, I know that’s way too much to ask from such a small device, but maybe someday…

When using as a phone: “call Tom” (standard voice dialing, as some other phones already have).

What else?

Eclipse 3.3 has lots of nice new features. One of my favorites — especially when I am working on the Mac — is Cmd+3 (or Ctrl+3 on Windows). This gives you full keyboard access to every menu item, command, preference, etc., just by typing a few characters of the command. E.g. if you want to rename something but can’t remember the keyboard shortcut for rename, just type Cmd+3, “rename”. You’ll be shown a list of every command that includes that word.

On Windows this is nice but not really a big a deal; but on Mac, it’s awesome for keyboard-heavy users like me.

(By the way, you can set up Quicksilver to do something similar for all apps by following an elaborate set of steps; but it’s hard to figure out how to do, and the end result isn’t quite as easy to use as what Eclipse has done.)

For the full description of the feature, go to this page and then search down for “quick access”.

So you’re debugging:

You want to know the value of ‘i’:

Flex Builder is smart enough to figure out, from context, what expression you probably wanted to see, which is often more than just the single token under the cursor. In this example, when you hover over picDimension, Flex Builder is smart enough to realize that what you probably actually want to see the value of is picDimension[i], not just picDimension:

picPos[i] is an instance of class Point:

In the above screenshot, we didn’t automatically show you picPos[i].y, because there is an easy way for you to get that yourself, by hovering over the “y” at the end of the expression, as shown here:

If you hover over the “length” part of the expression “gallery.photos.length”, we figure out from context what you are looking for — you want gallery.photos.length, not just some global called “length”:

You can select an expression and hover over it:

Finally, in all of the above cases, if you right-click, there is a new “Watch” command, to add the expression to the Expressions view. As with the tooltip, it figures out from the current context what expression you probably wanted to watch:

And in case you missed it, Ted has been posting other sneak peeks all week.