Finally, last night I made it. Its kinda quick and dirty, but it works, at least for me as I want it :). Here a screenshot:
I made this external help viewer for myself, but I thought if anyone who also finds Help Panel in the way most of the time when working in Flash CS3, might like to use it.
Download: FlashHelp_v01.zip
Note: Requires MS. Net Framework v2 or later. Not needed on Vista
// chall3ng3r //
Hi chall3ng3r,
I’ve been looking for a long time for an app like this, escpecially that Mike Chamber’s Flash Resource Manager is pretty dated and Eclipse’s external reader isn’t that much external.
I have to say that your app works sweet with my old CS3 documentation, but I can’t seem to get it working with CS4 help (under vista). Is there a way to use CS4 documentation in your reader somehow?
From what I see FlashCS4 documentation is in a few different locations, so I guess simply placing the reader wouldn’t work with it. It also doesn’t seem to contain categories.xml index.
Anyway – thanks for the app and I’m looking forward to playing with new version ;)
j.
Hi Jarek,
Thanks for appreciating.
I took a look with CS4 docs, but the issue is there’s no real offline documentation for Flash CS4, its just Using chapter. All AS docs/references are online.
Anyway, I am planning to add support for CS4 docs as well, offline + online. I’m not sure when I’m gonna work on that, maybe when I get annoyed enough, and it’ll be that kind of night again :D
best,
// chall3ng3r //
Well AS2 and AS3 references are the only parts of help I use frequently and having to wait for the online documentation to load is a pain. Maybe there is some way to add a dirty hack to open it in your app? At least the AS2 reference seems to look formatted like the old help.
Jarek, me too, I mostly look in Flash Lite AS reference.
I will take a look again soon for the next release. maybe it could be xmas present ;)
// chall3ng3r //
my Flash CS3 was installed in a different drive and folder and external help viewer can’t find it (of course).
can you make a simple patch to the program to read an ini file so i could set where it should look at?
thanks.
hukares, I will take a look if I could read the installation path automatically in next update.
Meanwhile, you can read the Readme.txt in ZIP file for instructions to find your correct install location.
// chall3ng3r //
Complete awesomeness.
Thanks so much for this utility!