This cool new app, “enables you to view, search and bookmark your documentation a lot faster than you could with the built in Flash support.” The interface is well-designed and gives users a familiar toolset from the past Flash Help panels but with improvements and added functionality. For me, running on OS X 10.5 this app ran great. The only thing you need to know is where the documentation you want to view lives on your system. They provide some tips for this on their site, just in case you don’t know off the top of your head or don’t feel like Googling it.

I recommend this app to anyone who is not happy with the current Flash help/documentation functionality. And if you are feeling generous I don’t think they’d mind if you donated a few bucks to the project.

» Download from here

Check it out over at labs.bigspaceship.com or visit the Automata Studios post here.

This is really cool, because for the past few years I have been basically building a fake directory structure that mimicked page views. There wasn’t anything necessarily wrong with this approach, but it was nowhere as ideal as event tracking.

Event Tracking allows you to track interactions with Web 2.0 style content such as Flash, AJAX, Silverlight, social networking apps, etc. We recently made tracking Adobe Flash even easier with the release of a new Flash Tracking client library. It allows for much simpler tracking of Flash content with drag and drop functionality and an open source framework.

 

To use Event Tracking, you will need to upgrade your site to use the new ga.js javascript. Detailed instructions on how to set up Event Tracking on your site are available on our CodeSite.

 

To find your ga.js code snippet, edit the settings for your profile and click the “Check Status” link on the upper right corner of the page. You can now track interactions beyond just pageviews.

Thank you Google, this is a most needed addition to your Analytics.

Read “No Time for OOP and Design Patterns”

var input:Array = ["item1", "item2", "item3", "item4", "item5"];
var output:Array = new Array();
 
function shuffle():Array
{
    while(input.length > 0)
{
    var n:Number = Math.floor(Math.random() * input.length);
    output.push(input[n]);
    input.splice(n, 1);
}
    return output;
}
shuffle();

Download the .fla for fully-commented example.

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.

I will have some work up within the next few days soon.