I have been messing around with Apollo and Flex quite a bit lately (actually, I fell in love with it … but that’s another article). Unfortunately, the solutions for viewing trace output that I have found were less than satisfying. They were either too cumbersome to implement, or caused my system to slow to a crawl.

The solution that I’ve found is simple, elegant, and totally familiar with anyone who has ever had to view a typical server log output.

Basically, I used “tail -f” and pointed to the local flash log. Unfortunately, this has the same problems as viewing any server log output using tail; it’s not very pretty, and it can be hard to read at times. However, it hauls ass and is easy to implement, and that is all that I really want.

It was easy to take it a step further in order to make it an easy to access command. Basically I just edited the “.bashrc” file found in my home directory, and input the following line:

alias flashTrace='tail -f /Users/USERNAME/Library/Preferences/Macromedia/Flash\ Player/Logs/flashlog.txt'Obviously, you’ll want to replace “USERNAME” above with your local machine username (If you don’t know how to get this, just open Terminal and type “cd; pwd”. The part right after “/Users/”is your local machine username).

After that, you can open a terminal from anywhere and type “flashTrace” to see the output (hit ctrl-c to return to the command line).

If you are a Windows User and don’t already have a shell solution, do yourself a favor download cygwin to access a unix-like shell and then you can also implement the above.

Simple, easy, and effective… at least it works for me

Cheers