:cubicleman.com

The other day a co-worker Andy Powell, no not this Andy Powell hehe, sent out a twit asking the question on what perspective do Flex developers use most, Development or Debug? Several folks answered Debug, but not I. Why? I like more space, enter Debug perspective only when needed. That and my work-flow ends up depending on trace() bullets more so I suppose, but that’s another topic.

This got me to thinking about a couple of things. The first is something in Eclipse called ‘Fast View’. Right click on say your Flex Navigator tab to get its context menu. You should see a ‘Fast View’ choice, choose it and see some magic. This creates a icon linky in the tray to the left by default. Click the icon to open the Flex Navigator and use it as usual. Click anywhere outside of the Flex Navigator or hit ESC to close Flex Navigator. Shazzam! More screen space. You can do this to all the individual views, putting icons in trays left, right, and center. You can also set Fast View on a tabbed notebook by clicking the minimize icon. In all cases you can switch back easy enough. That was duh! moment number one. I mean, I knew this already, but its easy to forget this sort of thing after working in one way for a while.

The second thing, and this is the biggest of duh! moments that day, is perspectives. Obviously you know of these puppies already, Flex Debug is after all a perspective. Did you know you can create your own? Yes! Thus I found myself doing just that. Open any perspective as a starting point. Add views you want, remove views you do not want. Got dual monitors? Super! Right click on a view or tabbed notebook and choose Detached, bamm you can drag this to your second monitor. Alternatively, just drag and drop your view or tabbed notebook onto the second monitor. So, on monitor one I have the main Eclipse environment with only the editor view there. On monitor two I have the tabbed notebook with the Flex Navigator and Outline views and one tabbed notebook with the Problems, history, Search, Console, Ant, Debug views in it. These are just the ones located on the left and bottom of the default Flex perspectives. Now for the magic moment. After getting all things cozy and where you want them, choose Window > save as perspective, enter a name, I called mine Dual Flex Development, and mash ok. bamm! Now you can simply enter the dual monitor perspective. Undocking and taking that lappy on the road? No prob, simply switch back to the Flex Development or Debug perspective for single monitor goodness.

Note that this will work with any perspectives…Java, CFEclipse, etc.

peas

DK

PostScript: how the hell do you screen cap a context menu? I wanted to add some screen caps to this, but gave up as the pop-up context dialogs disappear when focus is lost.