Mike Chambers picks up the stick on ActionScript documentation

This is something I discussed with Jeremy Allaire and possibly also Mike Chambers two years ago – At FlashForward in NYC 2001. The PHP documentation has been the prime example of good documentation and function reference on the web for a long time, and in my interview with Jeremy in 2001 I brought it up, and asked whether Macromedia would make documentation of Flash available in the same manner.

Now Mike is asking the question

“Would you be interested in a PHP like documentation system for ActionScript? What features would you like for it to have?”

My answer is hell yes, and look at the PHP documentation :-)

Its about time you guys got around to start working on better documentation :-)

[Via mesh on mx]

From my interview with Jeremy Allaire in 2001:

FM: Is documentation and making available documentation for products going to be something that will have higher priority?

JA: I don’t know where we will end up on that, but Allaire makes all of it’s product documentation available in HTML and PDF on the Web site. I don’t know if that is going to translate to also doing that for the other Macromedia products, but that is something that we have done historically and which people really like, they want to be able to have that. The other thing that we did that I think was pretty cool, with Allaire, specifically Spectra and JRun, and we are going to be doing it for ColdFusion as well, is the idea of Live Docs. It’s actually an idea we got from the PHP community. They don’t have a product; they just have Live Docs, which is the actual documentation on the product. Has annotations and comment from the community. So if there is an example or a reference or a chapter, people can annotate it and can comment on it directly inside the Web site, so each page of the HTML documentation is actually a little interactive application.

And that is a neat way of getting the community involved in that. I am hoping that we do that for the other Macromedia products.