How to make the Flash CS4 Help and Language reference available offline.

In CS4, the help system in Flash is set to online by default, which means pressing F1 opens a new browser window, takes you to LiveDocs and, most of the time, gives you no useful information whatsoever - and takes over half a minute to load.  Luckily I came across the following comment in the article http://labs.bigspaceship.com/2008/12/09/air-app-as3-language-reference/;

I should note, however, that the local copy of the language reference still exists with CS4. I wrote a post a while back detailing where it can be found for both OSX and Windows:

http://www.jonnymac.com/blog/2008/11/04/offline-help-and-language-reference-location-in-flash-cs4/

The difference is that CS4 automatically tries to send you to the online copy first. You can also access the local copy by telling Flash to “keep you offline”:

Go to Window > Extensions > Connections. In the panel that pops up, click the arrow at the top-right and select “Offline options”. From there you can check the box for “Keep me offline”. It will then always default to using the offline help. However, it may also prevent you from using any other panels which call out to the internet, such as Kuler.

Hope this helps!

Jon MacDonald on December 9th, 2008 at 12:30 pm