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Mac + Eclipse + FDT = a worthwhile huge pain in the ass?

Maybe it's just me. Maybe I'm too used to things working out-of-the-box when it comes to applications. Maybe it's because I'm on a Mac (at home). Maybe I'm a bit slow (a distinct possibility).

Today I tried to get a combination of Eclipse and FDT working, after two very clever ex-colleagues of mine highly recommended it as a better alternative to Flex Builder. After going for the PHP flavour of Eclipse on recommendation, I installed FDT through the Software Updates option within Eclipse. On restart I was prompted with memory warnings; that I needed to assign more memory to Eclipse. I thought this was a bit strange, as I was used to doing this years ago on Mac OS9 but hadn't come across it so far on OS X. Anyways, I managed to sort this issue but then compiling my Hello World test required the Flex SDK being targeted. No biggie, but needed to tackle workarounds involving playerglobal.swc on the Mac. Eventually I published my swf from ActionScript.

Decided to try and publish some MXML. Learned that FDT seemingly doesn't support it yet but that it's coming soon. So, right now I'm in this kinda vague no mans land where I think I know I should kinda be checking out FDT, but I don't appreciate why it's so good and the workflow process that might be entailed with using it (especially if you're also having to deal with MXML).

I'll hopefully update this again once I've made further inroads into the process, but after day one checking it out I'm not sold yet. Is it better than working in Flex Builder 3 and/or Flash?

P.S. Hello Adam and Joe! Not THE Adam and Joe, although they are pretty funny themselves.