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Comment by cpenner461 | Hacker News Reader

3) Good Free Toolchain: You don't really have to shell out 600 dollars for Flash. You can get your stuff done for free, using FlashDevelop and Flex SDK.

Interesting, I always assumed you had to buy the full Flash IDE to do anything. Granted, I never really looked into it at, but I wonder how widely known this is? Am I just ignorant? :)

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It's been a few years I've worked with Flash so I can't recall all the details, but we were doing nightly Ant builds of Flash projects with their SDK.

We only used the official Flash IDE for building animations, for programming, it all too easily allows for code to be flung everywhere and creates debugging nightmares (Flex and Flex Builder is a slightly different story).

I don't think it's widely known outside the circles of Flash game development. Most people who develop Flash games do it as a hobby and/or out of passion. Sure, you can make some money out of it, but if you want to make money, there are better ways to do it. I guess that's why it's a lot more important for us to find a free alternative.

It's pretty widely known. FlashDevelop is very popular, and then on top of that there are other non-Adobe IDEs as well.

FlashDevelop is a widely known alternative, just that it is available only for Windows and not the MAC.

FlashDevelop is the IDE though, the important bit is the Flex SDK which is Java based and runs on virtually anything. Write your code in TextMate or Sublime Text or vi or emacs or whatever and then compile it with the Flex SDK.

FlashDevelop is great, but it isn't an essential piece any more than Eclipse is an essential piece for building Java apps.

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