Flash CS4 Help File Offline What Happened to Tag Defintions Showing UP?????

Question

Ok I know I can set the help system to browse offline however
this doesn't work correctly for any less then ActionScript 3. When
you highlighted a word in the past such as "null" it use to pull up
the word and the info in all the books. Now all I see is a web
browser that doesn't do this for me. I mean who sits there at
adobe's end and thinks up of ways to slow someone down like this??
How can you remove the core help quick linking from the program.
Number 1 not everyone is on AS3 and some of us still have to update
AS2 code.
Bigspace ships has an air application that installed AS3 flex
reference but again useless unless you are on AS3. Has anyone found
another way to get this old school functionality to work on
CS4???

Answer 1

Jay Armstrong here. I’m one of the writers who works on
the Flash docs.
Regarding this comment and the many others in other threads
that have added important details about the issues with the help
workflow, and in particular the ActionScript help workflow: We hear
your pain and we are working to implement solutions to these
issues.
I understand that this new help workflow is more painful than
in CS3 when you had the Help right in its own panel in the product.
Here’s some background:
The implementation of Help within the Flash Help panel prior
to CS4 required that *all* the Help files be installed on the local
drive with the product, resulting in some issues that we tried to
address in CS4. Including Help on the installation disc caused
issues including:
- Required that Help be completed much earlier for
localization and end-game testing.
- Resulted in static Help files that had been completed early
in the development cycle, sometimes not accounting for last minute
UI or other changes.
- A long install process.
- Crowded the installation disc.
These aren't meant to be full explanations of why we made the
changes, but just some background as to some of the things we were
thinking about. Clearly the decisions we came to weren't the right
ones for many users. We are intent on making things better.
Moving Help online makes it possible to update Help on an
ongoing basis, allows users to comment on and embellish the Help,
and allows us to add links from the help out to new articles,
tutorials, videos, and code samples on adobe.com and throughout the
Flash web community. One of you rightly pointed out that the Adobe
Updater could have been used for some of this, but I believe that
the updater would have required much more rigorous certification by
us of any update packages and the update/install process for each.
We actually are updating the online help files very frequently, so
this process would have been a major barrier to these updates.
We’ve had a struggle about how to deliver the Flash
Help for a long time, as we have a lot of users who have been quite
vocal about not liking the Help panel consuming space within the
Flash window as well as users who really want it there so they
don’t have to leave the IDE.
Having said all that, I still totally understand what
you’re saying about losing your code, glance, code, glance,
code workflow. As you probably know, we’ve been getting a lot
of feedback about this, along with other issues that online Help
has caused. We are actively looking at ways of solving these, but
the Help-in-a-browser issue a difficult problem, as this aspect of
the Help implementation is baked fairly deep into the CS4 product.
Since CS4 shipped, we have implemented solutions to some of the
issues with Help raised by users, such as allowing you to select
the default destination of F1 (though Flash CS4 always went to the
actual Help system rather than the Flash Help and Support page,
which is what these users wanted in other products). I just
don’t know if there will be a solution in the CS4 time frame
for viewing Help within Flash itself. As noted in this thread,
there are a few independent developers working on non-browser help
viewers, such as Jamie Kosoy, Technical Director at Big Spaceship,
whose AIR application for the CS4 Language Reference docs is
available at
http://labs.bigspaceship.com/2008/12/09/air-app-as3-language-reference/.
We knew that people use the AS3 Language Reference a lot, so
we did install a local, abridged version of that with the product.
You only see it when not connected to the internet or if you
disable online connections as described earlier in this thread, and
it still opens in a web browser and still has the same navigation
interface as the online version. You can also download a local copy
of the AS Reference, which does get updated periodically and can be
viewed locally regardless of the state of your internet connection,
but it also is all html and opens in a web browser. As previously
noted, the download is available here:
http://help.adobe.com/support/documentation/en/flash/10/ActionScript3LangRef.zip.
I know this thread started off with AS2 concerns, and we hear
those too.
In some of the other threads out there about the Help, people
have raised issues about the contents navigation in the CS4 version
of the ASLR as well. We are listening to all these issues and
actively working on solutions that will address these questions.
We’d really like to give you better control over whether you
see online or local content, whether you see it inside the IDE or
in a separate application, etc.
I know that you are all really frustrated at some of these
help changes, and so I want to say how much we appreciate your
feedback. I’m sorry that my reply doesn’t give you the
magic bullet that you are understandably hoping for.
-Jay