Hot on the heels of my first release, I’m giving you another. As you may notice, I changed the name of the plugin from FlashHelp to HelpPanel. Mainly, that’s because I’ve expanded the plugin to include sources other than the main help files and LiveDocs. Additionally, it matches the naming scheme of the other FD plugins, which I think is a good practice to follow.
What’s new? Well, now you can add (and remove) custom search locations. Local folders work just like the regular help search, and online locations will do a Google search just like I set up with the LiveDocs. I also gave the interface a slight makeover, and I added better support for non-English systems. Head on over to the FlashDevelop plugins page and pick it up.
Saturday, December 31st, 2005
I just finished up the first release of a help plugin for FlashDevelop. I started things out by focusing entirely on searching for content. Once I’m sure search is stable, I’ll look into adding more functionality. The plugin automatically detects if the Flash help files are on the system. If they don’t exist, it will open a browser and search the LiveDocs. Of course, you can choose to search either location if you wish. Help file detection works for both Flash MX 2004 and Flash 8.
Behind the local help search is a nice little HTML searching class that uses weights to determine the top result. For every time a search word appears in the document, the weight increases. Words appearing inside certain tags, like <title> or headers, will receive larger weights. The algorithm runs pretty quickly on my system–usually only taking a few seconds to return the results, which is comparable to the help search in the main Flash IDE.
The included DLL is compiled against PluginCore from FlashDevelop 2.0 Beta 7, so it may not work correctly with a different version. The source is included if you want to recompile for a different version, or you’re looking to play around. You can download the plugin and source.
Monday, December 26th, 2005
Just read the word straight from the source, Tinic Uro. The next version of Flash player to appear on Linux will be 8.5. I know your average Slashbot could care less, and thinks Flash is just an advertising devil, but I don’t doubt many others have been waiting for another release.
I think this is a good choice. I’ve heard version 7 of the player is pretty buggy, so I know I wouldn’t want to dig into that code again just to churn out our friend, the 8-ball. Tinic says that they’re compiling 8.5 with the open source compiler gcc. Between that and Eclipse, it looks like someone’s a big open source fan over there. Either that, or they’ve realized that if they want Flash to become even more cross-platform, they’ve got to standardize as much as possible or they’ll be drowning in the zillions of tools and compiler oddities, and who knows what other muck.
Friday, December 23rd, 2005
If you haven’t checked out FlashDevelop, I highly recommend giving it a try. It’s a lightweight Flash editor written in C#, and I recently switched to it for all my AS2 development. Don’t get me wrong, I like Eclipse a lot, and it allowed me a lot of freedom compared to the main Flash IDE, but after playing with FD for a while, Eclipse feels like a 500 ton elephant. FD is quick, and includes most of the features a developer using FAMES is used to.
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Wednesday, December 21st, 2005