Flash Player 10/Flash CS4 documentation now available

Posted October 14, 2008 10:49 am
Filed under: Elsewhere on the web, Life at Adobe, Pixel Bender, Sites to remember, Vector (typed arrays), Writing

(or, “why I haven’t written anything new here in a looong time”)

Like so many people, my work goes in cycles (from “busy” to “crazy” to “desperate crunch”). If you’re someone who follows this site (if in fact there is anybody who does), you may have figured out that any time I go for a long time without posting, it means I’m near the end of a project (and consequently, that new documentation is coming soon).

Well, that time has arrived. With the public announcement of Adobe Creative Suite 4, we’re doing something different in terms of the schedule for releasing documentation. This time the documentation has been released ahead of time, before the product actually ships. (Primarily for the sake of search engine indexing — but hey, let’s not complain.)

Of course, a draft version of the Flash Player 10 language reference has been around for a while now, but if you haven’t had a chance to take a look (or if you want to know how things turned out in their final form), you can now view the final Flash CS4 (including ActionScript for Flash Player 10) documentation. Also, this includes several significant additions to the content in Programming ActionScript 3.0, so if you prefer to learn by reading about a topic rather than by piecing things together from the reference, then you’ll find this content useful.

Here are a few top-level links to get you started:

Just for fun, here is the new content that I wrote:

And here are some of the other new topics that I think are the most interesting:

So, what’s next for me? (Thanks for asking!) Since finishing the final versions of the Flash CS4 documentation, I’ve been working on some “quick start” articles around the new features. Those articles will appear in the Flash developer center soon — probably when Flash CS4 actually ships. (I’ve done one on the Vector class and one on the new FileReference functionality for accessing local files without a server round trip. Other colleagues have done cool things with dynamically generating audio and Pixel Bender — so I think it’ll definitely be worth a look.) Along with that, I’m working on new features for the next version of Adobe AIR. I also have a few side projects that I’ve been trying to make progress on as I can sneak in a minute here and there.

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12 Comments so far

  1. October 14th, 2008 at 2:50 pm
    josh is reported to have said:

    Is the lang ref. available for download somewhere? I like having a local copy on my machine I can access regardless of a net connection.

  2. October 14th, 2008 at 3:11 pm
    Paul Robertson is reported to have said:

    @Josh:

    As far as I know there isn’t a download for the language reference. I’ll check and see if I can find out whether there are plans to add one at some point — but admittedly I doubt it.

    Once Flash CS4 actually ships, the language reference will be included when you install Flash on your machine. For CS4, all the “in product” help actually runs separately in your web browser (i.e. when you press F1 or choose Help from the menu, it opens a page in your web browser), so you could access the HTML pages directly, too.

    The CS4 help works like this: first, it checks if you have an internet connection. If you do it automatically connects you to the online version. This is good because we make corrections to the online version as we find mistakes — something we can’t do as easily for the version on your hard drive. However, if you don’t have a net connection, it loads up the help off your hard drive (but still as HTML pages in your web browser). Due to the significant amount of lead time necessary for content that is actually included in the installer, the stuff that’s available when you’re offline is smaller than the online help. For the ActionScript content, the language reference is available offline but the Programming ActionScript 3.0 guide is only available online.

    If I had to guess, I’d say that’s one reason why there is a PDF download for Programming ActionScript 3.0 but not a downloadable version of the language reference.

  3. October 14th, 2008 at 8:27 pm
    RIA Revolution » Flash Player 10 and Flash CS4 Documentation Available is reported to have said:

    […] Paul Robertson reports that Flash Player 10 and Adobe Creative Suite 4 documentation is now available. The links are in his blog post titled: “Flash Player 10/Flash CS4 documentation now available“. […]

  4. October 22nd, 2008 at 10:40 am
    mb is reported to have said:

    I would also prefer an offline version, so that I can use XASH. I installed a paid version of CS4 and can’t find the offline HTML files anywhere.

    XASH is much preferred, as it allows itunes like instant searching, and your online version of the help currently sends the search to the community forums which rarely returns good results when I’m just trying to find the docs for a certain class.

    I don’t want to offend you personally, but the CS4 help system is currently abysmal. In typical Adobe fashion, it is a good idea not fully implemented.

  5. October 22nd, 2008 at 10:48 am
    mb is reported to have said:

    Sorry, In my last post I should have made a note that “help files” and “reference files” aren’t the same.

    Please petition for a downloadable version of this url:
    http://help.adobe.com/en_US/AS3LCR/Flash_10.0/index.html

  6. October 22nd, 2008 at 11:11 am
    mb is reported to have said:

    Alright… look like I spoke too soon - I found the langauage reference here:
    /Library/Application Support/Adobe/Help/en_US/AS3LCR/Flash_10.0/index.html

    Not sure where this folder would be on a windows machine. The problem with the current help system though in CS4 is that it is almost impossible to find these help files unless you are using the internal code editor, and right click on a property and click “view help”.

  7. October 22nd, 2008 at 11:29 am
    Paul is reported to have said:

    @mb:

    Thanks for all your comments. You’re obviously passionate about having usable documentation, and that’s great.

    I definitely don’t take personal offense at your comments. On the contrary, I greatly appreciate them and I will be passing them along.

    I’m not familiar with XASH although I’m very interested to find out more about it, and whether we can do anything to make the documentation work better with it. If you have a chance and can point me to some info about it, that’d be great.

    Re: “the online version takes you to the community forums” — Late in the process an additional feature was added to the search to allow you to limit it to “this help system only” (which seems to limit it to one “book” although I thought it limited it to a single product.) For most CS4 documentation that checkbox is unchecked by default, but for the Flash CS4 ActionScript documentation we specifically made a point of having it checked by default (e.g. see the Programming ActionScript 3.0 page). This option doesn’t show up next to the language reference search box, but a quick test seems to show that it is turned on for those searches as well.

    Also, as Google indexes the pages more, and as external links change the way Google ranks the results, we’re trying to tune the custom index to make sure results show up as expected. If there are certain terms you’re searching for that aren’t turning up, or that give unexpected results, please let us know via a comment in the help (or a comment here) and we’ll look into it.

    I’m glad you were able to find the files on your computer eventually. On my machine (Windows XP) the help files are here:
    C:\Program Files\Common Files\Adobe\Help\en_US\AS3LCR\Flash_10.0\

  8. October 25th, 2008 at 4:21 pm
    Stojan Ilic is reported to have said:

    Cool, I found in top right corner PDF version of documentation. Here is URL:

    http://help.adobe.com/en_US/ActionScript/3.0_ProgrammingAS3/flash_as3_programming.pdf

  9. November 3rd, 2008 at 2:16 am
    as3 refresh documentation for flash player 10 - Wave9 Forums is reported to have said:

    Kramer auto Pingback[…] volesse sviluppare su flash player 10, questo link offre numerosi riferimenti, purtroppo online: http://probertson.com/articles/2008/…documentation/ Altro utile link e’ quello che da’ istruzioni su come utilizzare flex3sdk per produrre swf10: […]

  10. January 8th, 2009 at 10:44 am
    HW is reported to have said:

    You can download a standalone ZIP file version of the AS3LCR, including its own local search for offline use, here: http://help.adobe.com/support/documentation/en/flash/10/ActionScript3LangRef.zip (ZIP, 7 MB).

    Note: this zip is also linked at the bottom of the main AS3LCR page http://help.adobe.com/en_US/AS3LCR/Flash_10.0/index.html

  11. June 28th, 2009 at 6:05 am
    Documentation for Adobe Flash CS4? - Stack Overflow is reported to have said:

    Kramer auto Pingback[…] Flash CS4 contains no documentation at all; it simply redirects to the online docs. Since I own the older Flash CS3 I was wondering if I could use the older HTML files with the newer […]

  12. October 7th, 2009 at 1:22 pm
    Bookmarks for September 30th through October 7th « Peng’s Blog is reported to have said:

    […] Flash Player 10/Flash CS4 documentation now available, a bunch of Words, punctuated – by Paul … – […]

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