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04.13.05 | How to debug your Flash movie

Nearly all of the help requests I've received lately have in one way or another related to problems embedding Flash movies into HTML, loading the XML document, and successfully pulling in the images contained therein. And in almost every instance, I've been able to quickly debug the problem by using Safari's Activity window (screenshot) to trace all the activity that's going on. If an XML file wasn't loaded, or couldn't be found, or there was a permissions error on the server, the window would flag the problem and colorize it red to quickly draw attention to it.

Realizing this was something only OS X users could use, I wrote a post over at my blog about this little gem of a developer utility, and if there existed anything similar for Firefox, which of course is cross-platform.

A lot of people wrote in, and the answer is LiveHTTPHeaders. It offers very similar features to Activity, but isn't quite as polished. That said, it accomplishes what it needs too, and makes debugging your content very easy.