Hey Jason,

Trial versions of software products, such as FDT 4, have a time limit attached to them. FDT Free does not. Instead it uses a freemium model where a basic version is free and advanced versions can be purchased.

The popups only appear when you try to use an advanced feature. At first it may seem a lot if you try to use all Max features; however, once you know a feature is only available in Max then they can be easily avoided – such as more than 30 seconds of using the profiler.

Flash Builder is 700$ – 100$ more than FDT.

The Free Version of FDT can’t really be compared to a 700$ product such as Flash Builder. I hope you’ll like the various features we over over Flash Builder in our Max Version.

I really like FDT, but the free version is not freemium. It’s a trial version. At least be straight about it, and respect your potential customers.

Refactoring names stops working after the 5th use, and nag popups are all over the software. That’s not what freemium is.

And $600 is probably limiting your sales dramatically. Consider a tiered pricing structure like Adobe has. I’m sticking with Flash Builder, but I wish I didn’t have to.

@Fedor

We’re woking on it right now. We just need to QA it for any potential issues.

It will be released very, very soon.

Please hurry with the FDT5 update site. Can’t use FDT5 until I can install it as a plugin

Hey archont, a few thoughts:

The workflow described, where developers put the entire source code of a library as part of the build path, should seriously be avoided. When this is done dozens, sometimes hundreds, of files are added to the project model. Everything about the workflow, from memory consumption to build process will be slowed down tremendously. This is why Adobe provides the option of using precompiled source code, .SWCs, when building your project. This is why all the libraries mentioned are all shipped with prebuilt .SWCs. When a developer uses a .SWC, the compiler interprets the source code differently leading to much, much faster compilation and much less memory consumption.

FDT will also perform much faster when SWCs are used. This is because when behaviors such as refactorings and code generation, they need to check all source files to make sure that the action about to be taken is correct. FDT will not consider SWCs because they cannot be edited – leading to a much more performant editor. The only case to have the source code of a library on the build path is when building, hacking or maintaining a library.

The project model can be edited by hand, as you mentioned, but this is dangerous and will likely cause problems elsewhere.

If you so not like FDT’s default warnings, this can be customized either per project or globaly. Check out this link for more info. http://fdt.powerflasher.com/docs/Adjustable_Error_Settings

FDT Free allows you to have as many unlimited libraries, via .SWCs, as you want.

>> FDT Free is not only the perfect edition to try FDT, but a fully usable IDE for your smaller projects.

This is actually a lie. FDT is a perfect IDE if you don’t ever plan on using any external libraries or APIs – like greensock’s tweener, robotlegs, pureMVC, as3corelib ect – all of those generate errors in the IDE – even though they compile just fine they are often speed optimizations that don’t go well with FDT’s strict coding style.

Normally one has to put the external libraries in another source folder and mute errors for that. Multiple source build paths are unavailable in FDT free so the software is pretty much garbage.

There is however a way around this! Just open com.powerflasher.fdt.classpath in your project’s .settings folder, add your source path with the sdkBased argument to true, like this:

ext

Then set the file’s properties to read-only and presto, your edition of FDT free is now usable!

Thanks for making this great software powerflasher!

Hi

How can I disable this annoying alert when my flash application has an Exception Fault. Or is it possible to disable the Debug perspective completely. I don’t need it. With this alert it’s just “free” not “freemium”…Thanks Christoph

I have to say I am quite surprised by the upgrade prices. I always used the 3 basic/4 pure editions, because all the others were waaaaay too expensive for someone that hardly uses them, but the €99 upgrade is something I could really consider.

Anyway – congratulations on the release.

Congratulations!

There is a way to do it, but you’ll need to download and import all the docs from adobe’s website. Check out this post to learn more:

http://zehfernando.com/2011/download-the-flash-player-actionscript-3-reference-files-as-a-single-zip/

Congratulations guys, great product. Just got my copy of Max.

I have a question: how can I add AS/Flex SDK help so it is accessible within FDT (F1 -> takes you to class/method etc. reference in Help pane)?

Is there a plan to add support for importing AS documentation at all? Importable documentation that was in Flash CS4 is too old.

Thank you