Flash Help Woes

I discovered today after a bout of reinstalling everything onto my home PC that Adobe have finally switched off the "LiveDocs" on Flash Pro 8. What a disaster for anyone trying to learn coding with older editions of Flash.

Now, why on earth would you want to use such an old app I hear you ask.

Well its simple. I find Flash Pro 8 to be a nice tool. It does everything CS3 can, well apart from Actionscript 3.0 and exporting to Flash 9 obviously, but thats not the point in this case.

Many of the projects I work on don't need the latest cutting edge tech in the very latest Flash Player - and as I'm mainly an Actionscript 2 programmer who finds 3.0 as much of a handful to work with as the transition from 1.0 to 2.0 I really don't need any extras.

Over the years I've used various incarnations of the Flash IDE in my work with various companies - Flash 5 was pretty good as a tool, but I found Flash CS3 to be incredibly unstable, and CS4's lack of "in product" integrated help a real annoyance for me.

Additionally Pro 8 has a very good Flash Lite testing environment - whereas although the newer CS4 tried to do this better, I've found the security sandbox being applied in the test environment just doesn't reflect what happens on a real device, so again I now always use Pro 8 when I'm building FlashLite 2.1 content.

The real killer though is the help. If you go back and right click on an actionscript command in Pro 8 or even CS3, you get a lovely help window that just "works" and tells you what the IDE thinks it is.

CS4's environment appears not to have this tight integration, and attempts instead to load info from the web, which is a sensible idea in terms of updating entries obviously, so I understand the reasons Adobe have used, but the reality is that Adobe has never been any good at making easy to use comprehensive intelligently searchable documentation.

And until Flash Lite finally dies off (which remember 2.1 is the equivalent of the Flash 6 Player) Pro 8 is still a valid tool.

Groan :(