I am not sure how widely known this program is, but if you are on a Mac and you can’t stand how long the Flash help file takes to come up, then you will definietly want to get Xash. It searches through the documentation as you type, and seems a lot more forgiving in its search results than the dafult help program is.

The only problem is that I can’t get it to load the CS3 documentation. It worked fine when I still had the Flash 8 documentation installed, but it can’t seem to find the path to the new stuff. The only suggestions I have seen said “you can open preferences of XASH and add an additional search path, /Library/Application Support/Adobe/Flash CS3/en/Configuration/HelpPanel/Help, then reload help files. (This assumes installation of Flash CS3)”.

Tried with no luck. Any suggestions are welcome.

UPDATE:

I tried one of the other suggestions that someone in the Xash comments mentioned, and it seems to work for the most part:

actually if you take the contents of
Library/Application%20Support/Adobe/Flash%20CS3/en/Configuration/HelpPanel/

and place it in the path that is listed in xash preferences you’ll have an external as3 documentation viewer.