February 08th 2010 | Jens C Brynildsen

Doc - offline Actionscript documentation

Do you use Flash CS4? Then you may have noticed that the documentation requires that you are online. Doc is a free AIR application that can index and display any ASDoc generated documentation in a snappy, searchable desktop application. If you've been looking for a better solution to looking up the AS3 reference, look no further.

Developed by Jeroen Beckers & Michiel Vancoillie this free AIR application should be installed on every Flash developers machine. We've always wondered about the rationale for only having online help files in CS4, but this application solves the problem for anyone working while on a plane, train or anywhere else. Another great reason for installing this application is of course that if you search the docs on Adobe.com, you'll likely get hundres of irrelevant results returned. While the search on Adobe.com has improved over time, using Google has really been the only way to get straight to the page you want, but Doc solves this as well. As opposed to the built-in help files in Flex 3, Doc has Copy and Paste that actually works so it's perfect for Flex developers as well.

Doc will only search the references you ask it to. You can add bookmarks to pages you use often and you decide what docs are added. You can add and index any local reference on your machine, but Doc will also let you add any remote ASDoc to it. Now you can have offline help for Papervision, Away3D, Cairngorm, JSFL, TweenLite and almost any other Actionscript API.

To add a remote reference, you just type in a name and the URL to it. Doc will then download all the pages, write them to disk and index them so you can search and look them up whenever you need. The indexed files are stored in AIR's SqlLite database and searches are really snappy.

Jeroen and Michiel has even made plugins for both Eclipse and Flash to make it even easier to access the help files, making this AIR appication a must-have for every actionscript developer.

Click here to download Doc and read more

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Comments

Posted by VideometryNet on 02/08 at 03:34 PM

I remember this annoying the s**t out of me when I first installed CS4.

However, while I’m sure this is a useful app, you can decide en Flash CS4 if you want online or offline documentation, though it’s well hidden.
Look under Windows>Extensions>Connections and choose “Keep me offline”