Meet your new best friend: Alf

Alf (Advanced Library for Flash) gives to real-time filtering/search on your library as well as other great productivity features.

How many times have you wished you could filter as you type in the Library? How much time would it save you, especially on larger projects with lots of assets, if you could type "dog" and see all asset names (or a subset, depending on symbol type) that contain the word "dog" in it? What if you weren't limited by the asset name but could search by Linkage ID and linked Class Name too? And, when you'd found a number of assets, how cool would it be if you could select a number of them and change the classes they were linked in one go? Pipe dream? It used to be, but no longer, thanks to Xavi Beumala's Advanced Library for Flash (Alf) -- an open source Flash IDE extension that lets you do all these things and more.

The ability to change the linked classes on multiple movie clips in one go is a real time saver!

If you use Arp or otherwise use a workflow that relies on the linking of movie clips to classes, you will find the ability to change the linked classes of multiple assets to be a huge productivity feature while refactoring your Flash application. The coolest thing is that Xavi added this feature just yesterday, almost immediately after I mentioned how useful it would be to have it. Something tells me that Xavi is going to be doing a great job of supporting and enhancing Alf in the future and, since it's open source and JSFL, there's no reason why we can't all join in on the effort and help him out! :)

Alf comes in an easy to install MXP. Once you've installed it, go to Commands -> Alf to display the UI and Bob's your uncle.

For more information and to download Alf, see Xavi's blog post.

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