Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008
Alcon 3 is in the works! The new version is being written for Adobe AIR and that means no more hackish OS integration! Thanks to AIR the debugging tool will run nice and smooth on any supported OS and it will restore your windows size and position where you last left it, Stay On Top works properly, auto-update etc. etc. etc.
Some of the new features besides the already existing Trace Command and File Loggers are a Memory Consumption and Frames-Per-Second Monitor, a completely new and improved Object Inspector that is finally useful for Debugging, an Options dialog to comfortably configure Alcon, proper AS2 support and a couple of other minorities here and there.
The progress moves on quick enough that I dare to say that the release date is only a few weeks away from now so sit tight, it’ll be there in a heartbeat.
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Thursday, August 30th, 2007
Alcon (ActionScript Logging Console) is a lightweight debugging tool for ActionScript 2.0/3.0 developers that provide a way to output debugging information (traces) from the debugged application to an external output panel.
It uses ActionScript’s LocalConnection to send the debugging information from the included Debug class to the Alcon Console. This way the developer doesn’t need to rely on the Flash/Flex IDE for debugging. Additionally Alcon offers some helpful features that make debugging easier.
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Sunday, April 29th, 2007
I’m happy to announce that Alcon 2.0 has finally been made public. The new version was completely rewritten using ActionScript 3 and Flex 2 and contains several new features that I missed in version 1. The most significant additions are the following:
- Output of up to four log files. You can define which log files to output by changing the settings in the AlconConfig.xml file. Like this it is easily possible to watch the flashlog.txt file that can be created with the Flash Debug Player (more info on this here and here).
- Alcon now features an Inspect panel for inspecting objects.
- A hexadecimal dump of an object can be made. Don’t ask me what this might be useful for now but you never know. 
- Alcon now features a stopwatch that can be used to measure passed time more easily.
- You are now able to monitor the current host application’s stage framerate and memory usage.
For more info and download check out the Alcon page over at osflash.org.
Please note that this is a beta version! It still has bugs and the Debug class for ActionScript 2.0 is not yet included.
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Wednesday, July 12th, 2006
I’ve updated Alcon (ActionScript Logging Console) to v1.0.8! The only thing that has been added in this version is a Debug Class for use with ActionScript 3.0, everything else hasn’t been changed. The AS3.0 Debug Class can be found in the com.hexagonstar.util.debug package.
Note that you must use Debug.trace() since I’m not even sure if it’s somehow possible with the MXMLC to redirect to a custom trace method (like it is possible with MTASC). If you got any hints on this, please let me know! The new version can be found as always on it’s page at the Flash Game Programming Wiki! Enjoy!
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Monday, July 25th, 2005
Alcon is a lightweight external output console for Flash ActionScript that allows developers to view debugging information without relying on the Flash IDE. SWF files can be debugged and monitored no matter if they are in the web browser, Flash Player or a standalone executable. While that Alcon tries to keep inclusion into projects as simple as possible. In fact all that needs to be done is importing the Debug class into a project and you are ready to send debug information to the console with a simple Debug.trace() command.
Included into a project Alcon keeps a small footprint and takes less than a Kilobyte of filesize while still offering some other helpful features.
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