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Flash Resource Manager

As I posted last week, I have been playing around (in my free time) with building a small app for viewing the Flash documentation outside of the Flash IDE. Well, the first public version of the Flash Resource Manager is now available.

Flash Resource Manager
Beta 0.93
Last Updated July 26, 2004

Created by Mike Chambers

Default graphics and application icons created by Josh Dura.

Requirements

Requires Windows running the .NET framework. You can download the .NET framework (all 23 megs of it) from here.

Installation

It is recommended that you first uninstall previous versions of the application before installing a new version.

Features

This application is a standalone resource manager for Macromedia Flash. It offers a number of features, including:

Screenshots

Help Preferences with Flex and ColdFusion Docs

Search Results with search term being highlighted.

Application showing livedocs support

Application showing latests Flash community news and info.

Search results from Regular Expression based search.

Search the macromedia.flash.actionscript newsgroup via a search plugin.

Change Log

July 26, 2004

April 15, 2004

April 8, 2004

Adding Macromedia HTML Help

Flash Resource Manager now has the ability to use Macromedia help in downloadable Livedoc HTML format. This has been tested with the following docs:

In order to add the docs to the application:

  1. Download and unzip the docs.

  2. Open the Resource Manager Application.

  3. Open View > Preferences Help.

  4. In the HTML section, press the Add button.

  5. Navigate the appropriate XML file within the download docs. There will normally be 2. In general, you want the one with the product name in the file name. The application will validate that you have selected the correct format.

    For example, the Flex XML file is:
    Htmldoc/000_flex.xml

  6. The default name for the doc will be the XML file name. Type in the name you want it to appear as.

  7. Click ok, and restart the application.

  8. The new docs should now appear.

If you test it with docs other than the products mentioned above, let me know and I will add it to the list.

Creating new themes

To create a new icon theme, copy the themes/Default folder to a new folder within the themes directory. You can then change the images within the directory. Any bitmap image type should work (bmp, gif, jpg, png). You can set the mask color as well as other information about the theme, within the index.xml file included within your theme directory. Images should be 16 - 16.

The theme name is determined by the name of the theme’s directory.

##Creating new search plug-ins

You can add new search plug-ins by placing them within the search/ directory. Flash Resource Manager uses a subset of the FireFox search plug-in format (which itself is based on the Apple Sherlock plug-in format). It currently only supports GET based plug-ins.

You can read the FireFox plug-in docs at:
http://mycroft.mozdev.org/deepdocs/quickstart.html

Note, the plug-ins must be well formed XML. Many of the FireFox plug-ins are not well formed, and thus you may have to fix them. If you are not sure, just look at one of the existing plug-ins.

Reporting bugs

If you find a bug or have a suggestion, please send it to mesh@macromedia.com. If you experience an application crash, please also send the logs/error.log file, as well as a description of your computer setup, and what you were doing when the application crashed.

Tips

CTRL-Click on a node to open it in a new tab.

SHIFT-Click on a node to open it in a new browser.

If the app seems to be using a lot of memory, try to minimize and then maximize it.

You can customize which buttons appear on the tool bar. The layout will be saved between sessions.

Notes

Resources menu is not yet complete.

Special Thanks

Chafic Kazoun
Robin Debreuil
Jason Merrill
Christian Cantrell
Owen van Dijk

THIS APPLICATION WAS NOT CREATED BY AND IS NOT AFFILIATED WITH NOR SUPPORTED BY MACROMEDIA.

USE AT YOUR OWN RISK.

Download

Download Flash Resource Manager Beta 0.93

Post suggestions, feature requests and bugs in the comments.

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