How to open Adobe Help in your Browser

Like the Beatles, "I'm feelin' down…" And this tweet from John Olson pretty much sums it up.

I dont think I can be anymore clear on how much I hate the Adobe help system. Adobe Community Help app BLOWS! Give me html help back plz

June 16, 2011 6:50 pm via Twitter for MacReplyRetweetFavorite

@john__olson

John Olson

I’m a fan of Adobe’s Dreamweaver documentation and often recommend it to students. However, Adobe’s system for delivering that documentation through an AIR-based* Help application (or as Adobe likes to call it Adobe Community Help) is at best annoying and at worst almost unusable**. So I was glad to learn from Rick Stone that it was a simple task to turn off some of the most annoying Help “features” or to bypass Help entirely and simply view the documentation in your browser.

The solution is simple, but since I’m not use to thinking of the help system as an application separate from the program it supports, I overlooked it and I suspect a lot of other people will as well. Here’s what you need to know.

Adobe Help preferences

As a stand-alone application, Help has it’s own preferences that you can access from within Help by choosing the Preferences item under the Adobe Help menu. To start Help choose [Program Name] Help from the Help menu of any Adobe Creative Suite application. You can also open Help directly from the following locations (assuming you installed your programs in the default location):

• Windows: C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Adobe Help\Adobe Help.exe
• Mac OS X: User Name/Applications/Adobe/Adobe Help.app

The Settings:

There are a number of Preference tabs and, if you are sincerely committed to using Adobe Community Help, you can explore them. The only one I’m interested is the General Settings tab.

I recommend that, under Accessibility Mode you select the Open Help in browser application option. The next time you choose the Help option within an Adobe program, the appropriate page from Adobe’s online documentation will launch in your browser.

It's really that simple and it improves the usability of Adobe's documentation immensely.

*AIR, as I understand it, stands for Rich Internet Applications only backwards. According to Adobe it enables “developers to use HTML, JavaScript, Adobe Flash® and Flex technologies, and ActionScript® to build web applications that run as standalone client applications without the constraints of a browser.”

**The most annoying “feature” of Help is that you are constantly being prompted to update AIR, update Adobe Community Help (which requires the program to restart), update the Local content or, as was the case when I last tried to use it, all three. You can control these settings to some degree using the Download, Updater and Local Content tabs in the preferences panels but the options are confusing and I’m not going to go into them here.

The other truly annoying “feature” is that closing the Help window quits the program and you are forced through another launch (and potential update) cycle the next time you want to use Help. Since most people have a browser open almost constantly, launching Help in the browser avoids this issue (and, in any case, a browser will load more quickly than Adobe’s Help application).

Let me know what you think

I’m interested in hearing your opinions of Adobe’s Community Help, pro or con, along with any tips you might have for navigating the Adobe Help maze. So please drop me a note using the comment form at the end of this post.

I encourage my students to update to the latest version of Dreamweaver but I also realize that financial issues involved. That's why I've worked hard to make sure that my Dominate Dreamweaver online training course supports Dreamweaver versions CS3, CS4 and CS5. It's also why I like to post about the new features offered by Dreamweaver upgrades.

In this video I take a look at CSS Inspect and other enhancements Dreamweaver CS5 has made to the Live View function introduced in CS4. It's a great feature that can greatly simplify your exploration and editing of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

As Dreamweaver has matured it's become more than a tool for designers looking for a WSIWYG web tool. It's become a serious web development tool and is even getting the attention of (gasp!) hard core coders.

In recognition of this trend, Adobe has added several new preset workspaces to Dreamweaver. The workspaces, which are accessed from the Window>Workspace Layout menu item, include:

• App Developer
• App Developer Plus
• Classic
• Coder
• Coder Plus
• Designer
• Designer Compact
• Dual Screen

As the names imply, the workspaces are  designed to accommodate the needs of different users in different computing environments. So, if you're not happy with the default setup, try one of these options.

If you still aren't happy, you can always open and close windows and move and resize palettes until you are. When you quit Dreamweaver it will remember your workspace. In other words, if you start with the Designer workspace, change it and then quit, your changes will be integrated into the default Designer workspace which you can access at anytime by selecting Window>Workspace>Designer.

To remove your changes and return the Designer workspace to its original settings choose Window>Workspace>Reset "Designer."

You can also arrange the workspace as you like it and save it as a custom workspace by choosing Window>Workspace>New Workspace… That way you'll have access to the new workspace as well as all the built-in defaults.

Finally you can delete or rename the custom workspaces you create by choosing Window>Workspace>Manage Workspaces…

As always, feel free to comment here or email me with your questions, comments and suggestions. And please follow me on Twitter (DWcourse) for additional Dreamweaver news and tips.

Question from @lavasusan via Twitter: Dreamweaver problem: how to get file list to appear for a site? Used to be able to open it thru "manage." Now nothing opens the list.

Answer: In the Mac version of Dreamweaver CS4 the way you access the Site Files panel has changed. You can now show and hide the Files panel by selecting "Files" from the Windows menu or by using the command-shift-F keyboard shortcut. In addition, when the files panel is expanded, clicking on the close window button now collapses the window and returns it to the panel dock rather than closing it.

Follow me on Twitter: @TOONrefugee