I don't know if you know it but FDT was never meant to be a comercial product. Nico Zimmermann developed FDT in 2004 because there was no professional tool on the market. He developed it only for himself, then for our company (Powerflasher) from there it went to our freelancers, and the rest is history. From the first days till today, we kept the focus on the professional developers like ourselves at Powerflasher. Moreover we keep guys like
in the loop and ask them what they think of FDT and what they are missing. This we include in the development process for FDT. And new developments like our Jira system
are also a great help. But also the increase of the market demand for professional tools in AS3 helped us a lot.
This is hard to answer, first of company policy and for different other reasons. But fact is that the user figues increased since FDT 3 by more then 400%.
How many members are in the FDT team?
The FDT Team consists in total of 8 people.
FDT's performance has increased over last few releases, how much more performance can be squeezed out of Eclipse before contemplating a standalone version like Flex Builder?
Flex Builder is also an Eclipse Plug-in. And many reasons for our increased performance are based on Eclipse. Eclipse is such a great platform, we are not intending to leave it. We still have tons of features and ideas in our heads that can be implemented in the eclipse platform, and also the eclipse platform is developing further.
Any chance Eclipse 3.4 Ganymede enhancements will be taken advantage of by FDT in the future?
Sure :)
I work on a large amount of projects and have separate workspaces for each client. Any chance of seeing the Export Preference feature or something similar for exporting workspace settings?
We get a lot of feature requests of differen developers. I always recommend to file them under bugs.powerflasher.com as a feature request, and we can score it, and very often, build it in. That is how we try to develop software, by getting feedback of the community.
Rumour has it you guys are working on MXML support, is this true?
True :) Give us a few more weeks, and we will bring it out, first in beta. Can be expected before the end of the year.
The AIR run configuration included in 3.1 is a huge help, any more AIR developments expected in the near future?
We are constantly improving FDT, and AIR is definitely a good thing for the future. But first off we are implementing FP10 and MXML into FDT.
Flash Gurus like Andre Michelle are paving the way for the rest of us Actionscripters, who in your opinion have made a big impact on FDT?
André definitely had a big impact on FDT. But all our Flash Heroes (check our blog) are big supporters of ours and have their impact on FDT. Guys like Branden Hall or Chris Allen, Joa Ebert, Marcel Fahle, they do a lot of good things for FDT. But the best Actionscripter I have ever seen and who also "invented" FDT was definitely Nico Zimmermann!!
And finally, are you planning on taking over the world? If so, who's Pinky and who's Brain?
Haha... I wouldn't object taking over the AS3-Editor world. We are travelling a lot and try to show FDT to as many coders as possible to spread the word. We think FDT can help to make the Flashworld get more professional and efficient. Saying this, you have to say if this is more pinky-like or more like brain :)
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