Ok, I’ve finished the object/class viewer and I’ve named it Object Explorer.
You can find the Object Explorer project page here or download the extension for the flash ide here.

For everyone interested in making his own extension: useful link on making flash extension.

Page outdated, for the new version of this application visit: Object Explorer

Ok, the exams are gone, and I’m ready to came back to my projects!

Finally, I’ve (almost) completed a reference explorer for flash: this application show the object tree in a swf, it can be useful while debugging and it can help find circular references:
in Flash up to 7 circular references doesn’t allow objects to be deallocated by the garbage collector. A nice explanation of the problem can be found in this Grant Skinner’s blog entry.

Although this issue doesn’t exist for the new Flash 8 garbage collector, it is still present in Flash Lite 2.x.
A reference explorer can also help refactoring or be useful to visually debug your flash projects and to explore object dependencies, in future I could extend it to show information useful for debugging like object variables and class hierarchies.

Usage:

• Download it and click on main.html
• Type the name of the swf you want to load, you can see the movie in a window
• When you are ready click “Analyze” to show the object diagram
• Red objects contain a circular reference, the name of the variable holding that reference is showed in a box
• After each object name you can see the class name

Download source and swf:
ReferenceExplorer.zip

Try it online with a test swf: (or your own if you set proper cross domain policies)
Reference Explorer

Reference Explorer at work:

Some links on garbage collection in Flash Lite:
Flash Lite memory management (LiveDocs)
Comparison between Java ME and Flash Lite
Flash Lite memory management

André Michelle in his blog point to a great article about AS3 internals by Gary Grossman, the creator of Action Script.

Ok, this should be a dev blog about flash, javascript and some projects I’m working on, but since I’m busy studying for the last 4 exam I haven’t do nothing interesting to show yet. So, just to keep you busy in the meantime, here two video worth to see:

Watch: Video 1
Watch: Video 2

I had stumble upon this great CG short movie today, it could be an answer to the Stephen Hawking question:

watch the video: Three Legged Legs™ ||| Humans

(Found on Protozoo.com)
This is a wonderfull timeline visualization tool, it graphically show the time and date when an event occur.
From the site:

Timeline is a DHTML-based AJAXy widget for visualizing time-based events. It is like Google Maps for time-based information

The event data can be loaded from XML or JSON. Clicking on an event show a box with event’s detail. It is even possible to distort the time in certain period, for example “zooming in” some days richer of events.
This an example of good javascript use, I wish we could see more of that.

Timeline in action: