It seems complicated but certainly it isn’t. The hardest part is to ensure you have the right player installed in all your browsers to make the log available.
http://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/downloads.html
If you develop content in Flash you should install the debug player in all your browsers. The Flash environment is great, but it doesn’t allow you to debug browser related issues easily. Every browser has it’s own idiosyncratic behaviors, and can cause all kinds of last minute headaches when deploying to a new environment.
Here’s a technote from Adobe regarding proper configuration of the player and requried files and profiling of the application in the player:
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/knowledgebase/index.cfm?id=tn_19323
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/profiler_04.html
Actionscript.org collected a number of the steps to do the setup.
With this enabled you can do away with polluting your code with special workarounds, custom trace functions, using Luminibox or Xray, and generally slowing down your flash application. In the end, when you are comfortable and ready for a release, you can just click the box ‘omit trace calls’ and you are clean and ready for release to the world.
One last piece of great code is FlashTracer from Alessandro Crugnola — this allows you to view the trace file from a panel in Firefox — great stuff!
