Occasionally I do leave my comfy Flex Builder IDE and venture into less code-friendly waters…mainly the Flash IDE itself. CS4 has a slew of new features for docking and collapsing windows but writing code is still quite difficult. Of course there is the existence of FlashDevelop and the potential to write pure AS3 projects in Flex Builder, but those can hardly replace the Flash IDE when it comes to timeline animation. Flash CS4 ships with a workspace named “Coder” which unfortunately doesn’t show nearly enough of the script to be useful. I took some time the other day to create a custom workspace I appropriately titled “Devsigner”. It makes life a little easier for those of us who need to write code in Flash CS4 by giving you a big script window, and enough of a stage window to arrange things when needed. You can also use F4 to hide all panels and show a fullscreen stage if need be.

Here’s a shot of the layout.

And here’s the layout file.
Devsigner.zip

Once extracted its just a plain XML file that needs to be dropped in your “Workspaces” folder in the Flash CS4 Configuration directory. See below for OS specific locations.

Mac: /[USER]/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Flash CS4/en/Configuration/Workspace

Windows: \Documents and Settings\[USER]\Local Settings\Application Data\Adobe\Flash CS4\Configuration\Workspace

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