Looking for “Help”

Ha, ha, what a clever title, a pun about Flash Help.  What a comic genius.

If I’ve spoken with you in the past 2 weeks, and you’ve heard the term Flash (even not in the Macromedia/Adobe context), I’ve probably asked you the question that has been tormenting me: what happened to Flash Help in CS4, and specifically, the help files that third-party extensions (like my components) add to Flash?

If you haven’t seen Help inside CS4, Adobe moved the default Help to its LiveDocs, so when you open the Help screen, Flash opens a browser and points you to the LiveDocs page.  On the surface, I think there is a good idea there: to keep the documentation as up-to-date as possible.  Seems like a great idea that should have been refined as an option through alpha and beta testing.

In Flash CS3 and prior versions, a component or extension developer could add Help books and documentation when the user installed the extension.  Now that the Help by default goes to Adobe’s site, that won’t be possible.  So surely Adobe anticipated this (or a tester saw this coming)?

Apparently not.  Several people have shown how to turn off the Web help and use the local file system (BTW, open Windows > Other Panels > Connections, then in the top right corner, click on the icon and choose the Offline Options entry, and follow the text).  However, even when Flash uses the local help files, our dear extensions’ help files are not there.

I figured that I must have been missing something, surely something as big as dropping third-party help files would have been picked up by this time.  So I went around the web looking for discussions about the new Help.  As expected, the results were not particularly complimentary.  Here are three links that pretty much have most of the responses from other places this comes up:

• Adobe Flash Forum
  
• Jay Armstrong’s blog, an informative post about Flash CS4 Help
• Flash CS4 Help topic from Google Groups

I received word from Adobe recently that I was correct about the third-party help disappearing (I just thought I hadn’t looked hard enough, a plausible explanation).  They say that this item is back on the radar and so they will try to think of what can be done.  Stay tuned, I will update this post as I find out more!