• Eugene: Json tracing bug
• Mozart Petter: Memory monitor bug
• Eric Woods: Auto refresh inspector
• Oknoeno: Display quotes correctly
• Mavrisa: Better Vector support
• Torben: PureMVC compatibility
• Justen: Smaller minimum window size
• Patric Lauber: Display HTML tags correctly
• Mansour: Bug in the initialize function
• Jerry: XML with CDATA support
• Bartek Drozdz’s: Renamed the enabled property
• Mario: Shift modifier on the numeric steppers
• Tim: Auto scroll the traces
• Ruy Adorno: Protected instead off private methods
• Steven Sacks: Added De MonsterDebugger to GAIA

(If I forgot your name please drop me a message and I’ll add you asap)

Additional to the fixes we’ve added an offline buffer that stores your traces when De MonsterDebugger AIR application isn’t connected. This way you’ll never miss a trace again. Also our own Monster Joost Harts updated the memory monitor to give you an overview of all the traces and memory profiling during the time you are debugging your application.

We hope you like the new update and continue to submit your bugs, features and wishes to our GetSatisfaction page. Check out the new version of the MonsterDebugger. Have fun debugging!

New: De MonsterDebugger on Twitter
In case you use Twitter and like to talk to us directly about the MonsterDebugger, make sure you follow @MonsterDebugger.

One more thing…
It’s been almost a year since we started working on the current version of the MonsterDebugger and we’ve reached the limits of what we can do with the current version. There is no stable way to squeeze more features into the current structure. That is why we’re very excited to announce that we started working on the next major version of De MonsterDebugger: version 3.0!

Version 3.0 will be a huge step forward in speed (6 times faster at this moment!), stability and extensibility. It unfolds a whole new playground with almost limitless possibilities where both Monsters and you guys out there can create exciting new features. We’re working on an easy-to-learn plugin system where you have the possibility to hook into our client and interface and start creating your own panels, filters, monitors, etc. To give you an overview we sketched out this super secret sneak model for you:

MonsterDebugger 3.0 super secret sneak model

Another major update is the use of a socket connection between the client and the AIR application. The first tests already show a huge speed boost compared to LocalConnection (the current connection).

So now is the time to tell us your deepest debugging desires! Leave a comment, submit your wishes on the GetSatisfaction page or if you’re ever near our cave in Amsterdam drop by and meet with us in person.

GRAW!

De Monsters in Zürich.

Sandro showing the tree structure.

Sandro showing the inspector which works almost the same as Firebug.

Sandro showing advanced traces.

Sandro showing method testing (and one of the best logos ever!)

Links:
De MonsterDebugger site
De MonsterDebugger at Google Code
Debugging Example
Tweetr – AS3 Twitter Library used in the example
The entire presentation (9 slides)

Monsters and beer!

If you want to showcase De MonsterDebugger, let us know and we’ll hook you up with some images, additional information and some goodies for you to hand out (Sandro: what’s your tshirt size?).

Tonight Paul and Ferdi will be interviewed about De MonsterDebugger and Blackbox by Jeffry Houser and John Wilker from The Flexshow. The entire interview should be online next month.

The response to De MonsterDebugger exceeded our expectations by miles as we pointed out in our previous blogpost. During the last month the community really showed their appreciation as we received a bunch of bug reports, features and even completely rewritten code in our inbox. For us this proves the whole point of open source software. We encourage you to keep sharing your bugs, ideas and thoughts with us to improve the product and support the community.

Some of the contributors
We want to mention the following people for helping us improve De MonsterDebugger through various ways and we really hope to see more from them and others in the future!

• Tom Jolly reported a typo in the code examples on our website and help files. He also currently holds the record for the longest thread in our Get Satisfaction account.
• Julien reported a memory issue and a problem with the numeric stepper component in the properties data grid.
• Bartek Drozdz and Tom Hensel helped making the client class better compatible with FDT and the new Flex SDK.
• Florian Landerl shared his solution that solved a problem with the highlighting of display objects.
• Urs Brenton reported that ASDoc couldn’t parse some of the comments blocks in our code and shared his solution with us.
• Wvxvw shared a better HTML encoder/ decoder function that’s way faster than the old one.
• Sandro asked for a MonsterDebugger.clearTraces() feature that would (hence the name) clear all the traces in De MonsterDebugger interface. We liked the sound of that function and implemented it in this release.
• Tadhg has submitted an interesting feature that we will look into for the future. He asked us if it was possible to send regular Flash traces to De MonsterDebugger. This could be great for legacy projects or custom classes that still use the trace() function. We haven’t implemented it in this release, but are searching for ways to make this possible in the upcoming versions.

Spread the word
The main reason why De MonsterDebugger has already been downloaded close to 4000 times is because of the community and how you help us spread the word. Check out the buzz page to see what people have written so far. If you find something cool that we don’t mention there, please let us know! Also if you happen to be in Zürich Switzerland on March 17th, be sure to drop by the Swiss Flash User Group as they are planning to discuss De MonsterDebugger during the meeting, which we think is absolutely awesome.

In the meantime we will try to spread the word ourselves as well. John Wilker from The Flex Show asked us for an interview about De MonsterDebugger. This will take place soon, so be sure to subscribe to their podcast.

And last but definitely not least, as of today we have a new t-shirt design directly available from our shop on Spreadshirt for everyone who kills bugs like a Monster.

The shirt is sold without any added commission on our side, just like De MonsterDebugger, we hope you like it. And of course keep sending us your feedback, bugs and ideas through our Get Satisfaction page. This update clearly shows that it really helps us to keep improving De MonsterDebugger.

GRAWH!

In short De MonsterDebugger is an open source debugger that can be used with Adobe Flash, Flex or AIR projects. It started its life as an internal tool to assist us while building the first prototype of PEF . PEF uses a number of techniques, but the main part is developed using Adobe Flash CS3 and AIR. As many Flash framework users know the Flash IDE doesn’t come with a sophisticated debugger. Since we figured that we were not the first to bump into this problem we looked at other debugger projects that were built from this craving need for a decent debugger. Some of them are listed here with their pros and cons:

X-Ray
+ View physical parent/ child relationships.
+ View all public properties and methods of an object.
+ Execute ActionScript at runtime.
- Only supports ActionScript 1 and 2 (which we don’t support at all).
- Unable to debug AIR applications.

Arthopod
+ Standalone Adobe AIR tool.
+ Send snapshots of a DisplayObject.
+ Password protected connection.
- No live editing possibilities.
- Only supports tracing.
- Need to predetermine what you are going to trace.

Das Bugger
+ Standalone Adobe AIR tool.
+ Really easy to use.
+ Has “always on top” as feature.
- No live editing possibilities.
- Only supports tracing.
- No multiple depths in trace.

Whitefly
+ Trace from the browser, IDE or standalone.
+ Explore Arrays, Objects and even custom classes in multiple depths.
+ Easy search through your traces.
- Light colors are hard to read.
- Has not been in development for quite a while.
- Is a bit buggy (quoting the maker).

Alcon
+ Monitor frame rate and render time.
+ Monitor memory consumption.
+ Supports ActionScript 2 and 3.
- Traces are a little bit hard to read.Does not support live editing of properties.
- The interface is too crowded for my taste.

The problem was that we actually needed a combination of the above listed debuggers, but unfortunately none of them were open source available at that time (except for X-Ray, kudos!). So we decided to build our own version and develop it alongside the development of PEF. Because the first version of De MonsterDebugger (version 0.9) was extremely valuable to us we decided to build a second version and add even more useful features:

• Explore your live application and check what’s going on under the hood.
• Adjust properties at runtime.
• Run methods at runtime and see what they return straight from De MonsterDebugger.
• Trace objects of any type to De MonsterDebugger and it will show the complete structure of that object in an easy-to-read tree structure.
• Highlight DisplayObjects.
• Auto update framework.
• Clean interface.
• Open source.

Open Source
Although we added this question to the FAQ many people still ask us why we would share something under an open source license. The main reason for that is because we want to give something to the community. During the launch of the second version we raised the bar a bit higher: We added a product site, started gathering feedback and took the time (and pain) to create a decent Flex skin. Also an open source project has more chance of succeeding due to the fact that other developers can adapt it to their own needs.

We invested a lot of time in polishing not only the product but also the website and help files since we are planning to release the first beta of PEF sometime this summer. And since we have no experience launching our own products we use De MonsterDebugger as some kind of practice.

Spreading the word
Having a cool application is nice, sharing this with others and working together to improve it is even better. The question is how do you make sure people know of its existence? Our social media experience is this blog (4 posts and 10 comments) and Twitter. Since our blog isn’t very helpful (yet?) with spreading the word, we decided to use Twitter and send out a newsletter. The initial buzz came from people who are following us on Twitter, their network picked up on it and started spreading the word as can been seen here: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=monsterdebugger.

This worked out far better than we had initially hoped. After the second day De MonsterDebugger was featured on several weblogs. A couple of nice examples are:

• Rozegain
• Big Spaceship
• Vedovelli

Fabio Vedovello surprised us by making a screencast in Portuguese of De MonsterDebugger after only one day. We think he was in a rush while recording it since he didn’t remove the part where his dog started barking (check the part around 6:00). Don’t take us wrong Fabio: We love it, even more with the dog! Another screencast showed up a bit later (no audio) showing a very different way of using De MonsterDebugger. The screencast shows how you can actually draw an object using a combination of live editing and running methods, in fact we never used it in this way and that is pretty cool to see.

While we had high hopes for the social media side of our little marketing campaign, we also decided to try out an old marketing trick: banners. Instead of making typical promotion banners yelling ‘free’, ‘download now’ or anything like that, we thought it would be better to give developers the opportunity to share the fact that they are proud to use it. Typing this still gives me the chills but I’m glad to see them appearing on several blogs:

• Vedovelli
• Trinidev
• Saumya

As a result of this micro-campaign De MonsterDebugger got downloaded a 1000 times during its first 48 hours. Although the main goal was to share knowledge with the community and build a stronger network, this launch also had some interesting side effects: De MonsterDebugger website was visited 1690 times, 520 of those visitors also visited De Monsters official website and 100 of them watched the PEF screencast . This resulted in contacts with new companies who are interested in beta testing PEF and giving feedback on this new service: yes, we are looking for launching partners, please email us.

Conclusion so far
We’ve been getting a lot of great feedback from people all over the world, so if you dig it when people tell you how great your application is, our advice would be to create an open source project and share it with the world! But there is a flipside as well, after reading a lot of good comments about De MonsterDebugger the more negative bug reports slowly found their way to our inboxes, so we decided to start debugging right away and almost forgot about our other projects. WRONG! Promoting your software on services like Twitter and actively participating in discussions on blogs or forums won’t cost you any money but do take up a considerable amount of your time. To give you an indication: We’ve spent three full days analyzing our visitors, replying to mails and merging in current discussions. We expect that we will have to keep investing more time in De MonsterDebugger in the near future to release bug fixes and help people with potential problems. Don’t get me wrong on this though, we intend to keep working on De MonsterDebugger, we even feel obliged to do so. We just want to point out that just releasing something open source is not enough, you have to stay actively involved in it and invest time to make it an actual success.

What’s next?
We intend to push a couple of updates to De MonsterDebugger in the next weeks. Also there have been some nice contributions that we received from some users via e-mail. We are quite confident that this will greatly help us improve De MonsterDebugger, but to further develop it we still need more feedback, help and contributions.  Yesterday Adobe finally released an improved version of the AIR Marketplace and De MonsterDebugger has been added! The release of De MonsterDebugger on the Adobe AIR marketplace could mean that we get more feedback on the application and thus more help to improve the application; we could be wrong though so we’ll keep you posted on this topic.

We hope that if you are a Flash, Flex or AIR developer you might consider taking 10 minutes and try De MonsterDebugger yourself. Feel free to help us spread the word, we are really looking forward to hearing and reading what you think!