When I first ‘really’ shifted from Macromedia Director to Macromedia Flash (instead of just using dumb little pieces of Flash within Director) — one of the things I missed most was Director’s message window; this little window allowed one to code completely in short term memory — creating and manipulating objects, as well as creating library (cast) media, or even external files (vLists were fantastic). Flash didn’t – nor still doesn’t — have this type of object manipulation.
When I started dabbling in Ruby, I was happy to find that the IRB worked in a similar was as the Director message window. But lately I’ve been working more in php, and specifically, in wordpress; attempting to setup my development environment to work in a way I’m used to in other languages — with debugging ability more than just printing out log messages. So far I’ve got xDebug up but it seems I’ve either got to allow it to break upon first line (which happens EVERYTIME a page is displayed) or… well that’s really it because breakpoints aren’t working in the php page. Hopefully someone else can point out how this is done..
HOWEVER the one thing I’m really jazzed about is the WordPress Console plugin that I just found via this article that describes it’s use — and I’ve got to say it’s already proving it’s (virtual) weight in gold.
