I started using Flash CS4 for around a week now and I have to say that I love it—for the most part. There are a few quirky bugs, for example, the app will crash instead of closing occasionally. Overall I welcome the new features and tools.
The one thing I can’t get my head wrapped around is why in the world Adobe would remove the integrated Help system and replace it with a link to their online help documentation. While I see the benefit of online documentation being simpler to update and/or amend I can’t help but to hate this change. The Flash CS3 Help panel offered efficient access to the ActionScript API’s.
I have looked around for solutions and have noticed that quite a few people are bothered by this just as much as myself. On Lee Brimelow’s blog, theflashblog.com, a reader posted an interesting fix in a comment. Matt Przybylski, over at evolve.reintroducing.com also posted some details and further expounded on the idea of disabling the URL and viewing your Help files locally on your system.
Overall I am not satisfied with these solutions and I am looking into other alternatives. I am exploring ways of either bringing in the entire Help Panel from Flash CS3 into CS4 or just taking the content from CS3 and building my own Window SWF and loading a custom panel in CS4.
I will be sure to keep this post updated with any progress.
Hi Ryan. We hear your pain and are working on solutions to improve the situation. In the meantime:
If you’re connected to the Internet, the Help menu within the product opens the product Help and Support page by default. This page is a portal to all of the Community Help content for the product. If you want to consult or search online product Help only, you can access it by clicking the product Help link in the upper-right corner of the Help and Support page. Once inside the Adobe Help for the product, be sure to select the This Help System Only option before you do your search. Otherwise, Adobe content and Community content will be returned in the search results.
If you’re not connected to the Internet, the Help menu within the product opens local Help, which is a subset of the content available in online product Help. Because local Help is not as complete or up-to-date as online product Help, Adobe recommends that you use the PDF version of product Help if you want to stay off-line.
A downloadable PDF of complete product Help is available from two places:
- The product’s Help and Support page (upper-right corner of the page)
- Local Help and web Help (top of the Help interface)
If you are working in Adobe InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, Fireworks, or Dreamweaver, and you want to turn off Community Help so that local Help opens by default, do the following:
1. Open the Connections panel (Window > Extensions > Connections).
2. From the Connections panel menu , select Offline Options.
3. Select Keep Me Offline and click OK.
Thank you for the feedback Jay. I have to admit I was a bit surprised when I saw the comment come through. You have mentioned some helpful links and there are quite a few smart people coming up with solutions of their own. Part of me still misses the Flash CS3 help panel, but I am getting used to not having it around.
I have a whole new set of quirks that are driving me more crazy than the missing help panel now.
Cheers,
Ryan
Hi, I myself is very disappointed with CS4 help.. The integrated Help was best and there is no doubt about it, adobe could have placed links under each page towards online copy, as they were doing in previous versions. Taking help completely out of IDE is very annoying and surprising move. My productivity is affected too much with this move. I hope adobe will provide some fix, patch or update. I didnt liked Adobe CS3 AS 3.0 style help as well, Macromedia Flash 8 style help for Actionscript 2.0 was best. As it had examples for each and every function, property and class.