You'll Get No Help From Flash CS4

I got the new Creative Suite 4 at work the other day. My boss tells me I am one of four who got it this early. He was one that got it too. I asked him why they wasted a copy on him. From what I gathered, so he could open the program and then say he’s got mad skills.

Disc 1, Disc 2. Once it installed I was on my way to going through all the new features. Still had to setup. I can’t touch a new version of CS without setting up all my panels just like the previous one. Then I think about how the new feature panels fit into it. As I went to put the Help panel where it goes in my workspace I am redirected to Safari! I thought I was in Flash a second ago? I looked all over for a new place for the Help panel and came up with squat. Then (because Flash so generously opened my browser for me) I looked for others that were up-in-arms about this change as well. Google let me know I wasn’t alone.

I found this post where there is some kind of workaround for it. This doesn’t keep it in the IDE though. It just makes the help be local instead of on the internet. Which is faster, but doesn’t address the real problem. I like to look at the help and the code the same time, my Workspace is based on the premise that the Help panel is on my right side.

Apparently, Adobe has no intention of putting this back in the IDE. Looks like they are making the big push to get developers out of Flash and into Flex. Sure, it’s more money. Hey Adobe, I’ll use Flex because it is a better editor, not because you hack shit out of other programs to corral me into using it. All I can hope for now is that someone will develop an extension for Flash, basically an internal web browser like Flex, that can display help.