I was working on a straight Actionscript 3 application in Flex Builder and realized one thing I was missing was a way to do a trace. When I write actionscript I use trace all the time, much like I use the alert in javascript to check the value of variables or to see if I am executing a method when I think I am.

I have been trying to learn the Adobe Flex framework and Flex Builder. In order to use flex, you don't need Flex Builder, but it is a nice application built on top of the Eclipse IDE. It comes in the standalone version, or it can be a plug-in to Eclipse. Either way it is Eclipse re-purposed for writing flex and actionscript. I wanted to see how easily it was to connect to a webservice, so I found a nicely documented webservice to connect my application to.

I downloaded the Adobe Air SDK so I could develop some Air applications, but once I downloaded it, I was at a loss of how to go about installing it. Adobe's instructions are missing from the package and nowhere to be found on their site. I have a PPC mac, so these instructions should work for those with that configuration. If you have an Intel mac, I am assuming this would work for that as well. It should also work for other *nix type operating systems.