Deitte.com

When I took a trip into HTML/Javascript work last year, I had to make some pages look like a given design. I asked a co-worker at Brightcove, Leonard Sutton, to check over what I was doing. He took one look at my computer and installed Firebug. My CSS work changed completely after this. The Firebug extension has a few purposes, but the most useful function is the dynamic setting of CSS. If you hadn't tried it, it may not seem like a big deal to reload a page on every CSS change... until you've made a few hundred of them. And half of them don't look the way you expect. I ended up making almost all my CSS changes in Firebug.

Now Flex has a similar tool in FlexSpy (found on riapedia.com). Unlike riapedia, I don't think of this as a "component for developers starting to learn Flex" but rather as a component for anybody making a lot of design changes in Flex.

Before FlexSpy, when I got handed a design, I'd make a few changes, recompile, navigate to a component (or change code to navigate to it), see the design (which sometimes didn't look the way I expected), and start the process over. This gets very tedious very quickly. Now I can make a change with FlexSpy and see it immediately in the application.

Hopefully Thermo will make me very happy, allowing me to stay away from more of the design implementation. Until then, I'll be using FlexSpy.

I didn't see a way in FlexSpy to grab all the changed values, which would be very helpful. I'd also love to have shorter lists for the properties and styles, both a list of the most commonly-changed keys and a list of the keys I changed most often. But hey, it's an open source project, so I only have myself to blame if those features aren't there.