I have emerged victorious from my month-long ActionScript adventure, and I owe it to this tutorial on how to read trace() statements from your browser.
Typically when coding ActionScript, you run trace() statements to output debug messages like any other compiled language, or like console.log() for Firebug. But when the SWF runs in the browser, those trace() statements are no longer visible, which simply isn’t good enough for me when I’m running something with a lot of background API calls like Google Analytics Tracking for Adobe Flash. Things can behave very differently in the browser.
After going through the tutorial to set this up, which doesn’t take long, those trace() statements will output to a log file that you can view as it changes. Not only is this incredibly useful for fixing bugs, but you get major geek points for having lots of text scrolling by in Console.app, the geekiest of all apps.