Olog (formerly, AILogger formerly OKtrace, formerly text field on stage..) is a logging utility I have been using since the early days. The previous version, AILogger has been the most feature rich to date. But over the years a need to rewrite the whole thing has been growing more and more urgent. It actually started life as an AS1 text field on stage, and was then made into an AS2 class which was then refactored for AS3. But after a while it became evident that it had been patched up too many times to do new things and was in desperate need of some overhaulin’.

It’s about time it took its name from its father as well, so I’m abandoning the scheme of naming it after my employer. (OKTrace = Okular, AILogger = Allegro Interaktiv). It has always been my pet project, so I’m taking it with me everywhere I go from now on. I also wanted a short name, seeing as I’ll be typing it a lot, so Olog it is (the “O” from Oyvind).

So this time it’ll be different, I promise! Olog 0.9 is actually AILogger 1.2 and then some in terms of features, but the first step in making it was “File > New”. It’s completely rewritten, and no copy-paste this time. It has been tagging along during my latest project and so it has seen plenty of action already. I’ve tested it quite thoroughly, but it’s hard to say what happens when you try to live on your own for the first time. That’s why I have humbly versioned it 0.9b for now.

New features

Here are some new things you might like:

• Full featured window interface. Minimize/maximize/close buttons, double click on title bar to minimize. Moveable and resizable.
• Selective line numbers, time-since-movie start and clock time for each line. These can all be turned of or off during run time.
• Filtering of log levels. Pressing number keys 0-5 filters the log to show only those severity levels (color). Esc to escape.
• Automatic update check. Olog will check for a new version once a week if you let it and notify you if there’s a newer version.
• Save log to text/XML.
• Persistent window state. Position, size, minimized/maximized state is remembered so you don’t have to keep moving it out of the way each time you compile.
• Run time markers. Set a new named point-in-time marker, which you can later complete to display load/execution times.
• Support for AILoggerEvents, but Olog has it’s own OlogEvent as well for loosely coupled logging.
• Stacking of repeated messages.
• Full ASDoc documentation.

The olog page on my blog has all the links you need, direct ZIP download, SVN repo access, asdoc documentation, Google Code homepage and even a simple demo. I’ll love to hear it if you have feedback!

• Added public describe method to log all properties of an object
• Added support for CODE_TRACE, these lines are color coded gray.
• passwordDisabled property renamed to disablePassword
• stampLinesWithSender property renamed to disableSenderLabel
• Fixed support for CODE_EVENT log coloring
• Supports new paramteter origin in AILoggerEvent to specify the sender of a log message
• Better handling of logged ErrorEvents
• Now recognizes logged color numbers and displays it’s HEX code and colors the line with that color

Get it here

One week in the wild and three minor updates have passed and it’s time to give AILogger some new functionality and a few tweaks. If you’re tired of downloading new versions, you’ll be glad to know that I intend to to start piling the updates with slightly longer intervals from now on.

This time, we reach version 1.1.0 and here are the changes:

• New optional detailed logging via public var detailedLogging
• Option to turn log coloring off via public var coloring
• More robust handling of different message types
• More robust log coloring

Download version 1.1.0 here.

EDIT: Version 1.0.4 available

[1.0.4 - 5.6.2009]
- Better information output from logged events

[1.0.3 - 4.6.2009]
- Added ability to detect logged events
- Logged ErrorEvents are now displayed with event type

[1.0.2 - 2.6.2009]
- Fixed a bug where severity coloring was not applied to the last characted in a log line

Today I was convinced to share a piece of code that has been with me for many years. AILogger is a sophisticated text field on your stage to write stuff into when trying to debug a Flash application that’s online. It has several features lite automatic date/time stamping, severity coloring, repeat detection, password protection, line appending and keyboard scrolling. You can download and read more about it here.