Last year Adobe released a free and open source Flex 3 SDK. Flex is essentially, flash without the Flash Application. Using Flex alone, you can build fully functional Flash AS3 or AIR applications. Instead of using Adobe Flash (the application) to build my NeatTools application which kinda sucks for writing code (not to mention the expense), I’m using the Flex 3 compiler that is part of the SDK.
I was using SEPY for my actionscript editing and it was pretty good, but I moved to FlashDevelop which I love. It has great integration with both the Flash IDE and the Flex SDK, so workflow is very smooth. It handles all the compilers settings, so there is no need to use the command line compiler. Release 3 just got out of beta in late December, so it’s actively developed unlike SEPY which hasn’t put out a RC since 2005.
These two tools are all you need to start building your very own applications.
Flex 3 SDK
FlashDevelop
http://www.flashdevelop.org/community/
And for help, I found a video detailing the steps neaded to get it all working.
