While it’s possible to have both individual Flash Tracer and Firebug extensions running at the same time, performance often suffers significantly. Adding Flash Tracer as a Firebug extension seems to have improved performance while making it more convenient and accessible.

As of this writing, it’s still in early beta but it’s working well enough for me. Check it out for yourself at sephiroth.it .

- Glenn

I can’t tell you how many people I’ve introduced to “Movie Explorer” in Flash. It’s a useful tool for hunting and pecking around in an FLA to find objects. The more you use it however, the more you notice its limitations. Enter Advanced Flash Library (ALF), a free Flash extension that takes Movie Explorer to a professional level.

If you’re a super-organized coder who only ever has to work on your own code, maybe you don’t need this extension. But if you work in a capacity where you often find yourself wading through horrible code and hundreds of objects named Symbol xxx, Symbol xxx copy, and Symbol xxx copy 2, then ALF will prove to be an invaluable addition to your extensions list.

Unlike Movie Explorer, ALF allows you to search for objects by its library name, linkage name, or class name. Results can be filtered by item type and performance is very good even in files with many objects. ALF even boasts the ability to help you bind several items to the same class, or change one class binding for another.

To introduce you to ALF and its features, the folks at code4net have created a helpful Captivate presentation. And to top it all off, they’ve made the code open source and accessible in a Subversion repository.

For more details, or to download the most recent version of ALF, visit their project page on OSFlash.

-rG