For those of you who don’t know what Flash Tracer is, it’s a Firefox plug-in created by Alessandro Crugnola that lets you see the output of any trace() statements hidden in the Flash code. Very useful! You can get the plug-in by visiting the following link:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3469
I recently ran into some trouble with Flash Tracer, namely that it wasn’t working at all. I consulted the online help and went through the checklist:
- Flash Debug Player? – Check! I’ve had that for a while.
- Output file pointing to the right text file on my system? – Check! I reset it manually just in case. (And FYI, the path on a windows machine should be “C:\Documents and Settings\{User}\Application Data\Macromedia\Flash Player\Logs\flashlog.txt” – obviously replace {User} with your username)
- Make sure Flash Tracer is not paused? – Check!
Why wasn’t it working? It drove me absolutely batty, until my friend Scottae pointed me to this web page to verify I had the right version of Flash Debug Player installed:
http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=tn_15507
Looks like I was a little too hasty with my first check mark. The website revealed to me that I did NOT have Flash Debug Player installed for Firefox. Apparently, way back when I first installed it, I accidentally installed the IE ActiveX control, not the Netscape enabled one. Most Flash developers of any accomplishment will probably snicker at my mistake… However, for you newbies out there who aren’t able to get Flash Tracer to work, do yourself a favor and use that handy little link to make sure you actually do have Flash Debug Player for Firefox installed. Lesson learned!
Oh, and Alessandro has explicit instructions to get your plug-in to work here: http://www.sephiroth.it/firefox/flashtracer/
- George
You probably had the Flash 9 debug player and then upgraded to Flash Player 10 and got the regular version of it. That would explain why tracing worked before and not recently.
Flash Tracer suddenly stopped working for me today. I checked all three of your items including going to the adobe site to verify. I do have the debug version. flashlog.txt is empty.
@Michael
Did you get any upgrades to Flash Player, or switch browsers, or do anything that changed your environment since yesterday? Also was it yesterday that you can verify it was working last?