Perfect KeyBoard Pro - The best utility for Flex development
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Published
Friday, April 07, 2006
at
7:10 AM
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I have adopted a new utility that adds keyboard macros into any text editor. Basically it watches you type and runs macros in the background. It has dramatically accelerated my Flex and ActionScript development and is ideal for any text editing task.
Perfect Keyboard Pro - $29.95
1. In any editor, type: /x2:bu
2. It is replaced with: <mx:Button />
I know...right now your saying naaaahhhh my text editor does this. Actually no it doesn't. Bear with me, this is a subtle change. Note I didn't press any special keys, I just types a series of keystrokes, no CTRL+Shift+ALT+D key crud, nada.
Basically you can write macros that are triggered by a set of keystrokes on your system. This extends any text editor and essentially makes any place you can type a command line. Its very simple and seamless. Where code completion only works on words at a time, this toolset can replace blocks of any size. The pasted text can be templated and supports dialogs and data input.
It gets better...
1. In any editor, type: /x2:app
2. It is replaced with:
Note: The cursor is placed between the mx:Vbox tags and it looks much better in FB2 :)
Basically the toolset watches you type and runs macros in the background. In a few keystrokes I can go from an empty document to a working Flex 1.5 or Flex 2.0 application. The best part is that its customizable and scriptable with dialogs.
Another example with dialog:
1. In any editor, type: /x2:wbu
2. Dialog appears with fields for 'id', 'label', 'click'
3. Optionally fill out the ones I want and press enter.
4. It is replaced with: <mx:Button id="myButton" label="Push Me!" click="myButtonClick( event )"/>
I am writing a large library of these macros for Flex 1.5, Flex 2.0, ActionScript development and will be sharing these for free here. Basically it doesn't lock you into an a text editor and allows you to take your favorite macros with you. Any application that uses text can be extended with these macros.
ASCII Text, so simple, so powerful, and so underestimated. Stop wasting time typing and automate your text workflow.
Best of all this just extends the goodness built into Flex Builder 2.0 (and notepad)!
Cheers,
Ted :)
I think you've found a real winner Ted... VERY nice find... thanks for sharing.
way to go !! bravo !
I use phraseExpress for something similar, it's superior as it has a pop up menu to let you select from phrases rather than purely doing short cuts. Plus it lets you build new phrases by copy/paste and then searching the tree for the appropriate node and then insert from clipboard.
I use it in conjunction with MacroExpress (www.macros.com) for automation, as it has a very rich feature set for automating windows. They can talk to each other (kinda a hack) via windows+key commands.