Aral Balkan: Historical Archive — The problem with LiveDocs

The problem with LiveDocs

Ever wonder why Adobe LiveDocs (sample page) is so slow? It takes, on average, a single use of LiveDocs to give up on it forever. I remember doing so many moons ago when I found it so slow that it was unusable. Nowadays, if a Google search brings up LiveDocs and I mistakenly click on it, my series of reactions is to (a) frown, (b) sigh, and (c) hit the back button as quickly as possible before that mother of a beast chokes up my browser.

I'd actually conveniently forgotten about LiveDocs for a while now. We had evolved a zen-like calm in our relationship where we stayed out of each other's way and no one got hurt. It's only on my radar this morning because someone who goes by the moniker of Spender sent a link to a discussion thread titled Adobe Livedocs: A World of WTF to the FlashBrighton mailing list and it reminded me of just how unusable LiveDocs is.

But why exactly is it so slow? Well, someone on that thread actually captured the behind-the-scenes traffic on LiveDocs and published it as a SWF movie. You have to see this -- it's actually quite humorous (well, as much as an animated traffic graph can be, I guess!) :)

Adobe, please do something about LiveDocs. They really are completely unusable in their current form.

Comments

hehe... it's funny. randy's apology really made me laugh. :)
by spender on 2007-03-23 10:16:58
Hi, Yep I agree:) For flash 8 there is XASH (http://mabblog.com/xash.html), well for the mac anyway! It is wonderful, and fast. I never look at the LiveDocs for Flash on-line anymore. Now if only somebody would make something like this for the rest of Adobe products:)
by John Barrett on 2007-03-23 10:24:48
Thanks for posting the link, spender. John: XASH -- cool -- will check it out :)
by aral on 2007-03-23 10:27:47
Not only livedocs is slow, the whole Adobe website is slow, and the shop may be the slowest part...
by Ahmet on 2007-03-23 12:22:14
Yep Adobe LiveDocs suck, they really do. Would love to see them improved. Cheers!
by Zarate on 2007-03-23 12:53:35
Anybody know what program is used in that video? Seems like a great tool to have.
by Ryan Pieszak on 2007-03-23 12:59:03
it's a firefox add-on 'Firebug'. http://www.getfirebug.com/ p;)
by paddy on 2007-03-23 13:17:05
Hi Aral, We hear you. Obviously, we're aware of the problem and have been working to make it better. The Flex 2/2.0.1 LiveDocs are better than Flash 8 and the CS3 LiveDocs should be a lot better. And, to be fair to Adobe, before the Adobe-Macromedia merger I was concerned about how the "Adobe" people would respond to LiveDocs and I have to say that they have been very supportive and are working to improve and extend the system, as the CS3 LiveDocs should prove. Also, I want to clarify one thing that some people missed in the WTF thread: It's the WebWorks Publisher-generated JavaScript we use that causes the problem. The LiveDocs architecture itself is, I think, pretty clever. Spender, I hope someday to make you laugh at how fast and useful you find LiveDocs. Randy Nielsen Flex and ColdFusion Learning Resources Manager Adobe Systems Incorporated
by Randy Nielsen on 2007-03-23 13:31:05
Randy: "I have to say that they have been very supportive" Jensa: This really makes me sad... Randy: "The LiveDocs architecture itself is, I think, pretty clever" Jensa: this makes me even more sad to hear that the docs team actually believes that Speed is just one of the problems with LiveDocs. Truth is the whole system sucks. Here is something I wrote about that: http://www.flashmagazine.com/1127.htm We've even discussed this with Jeremy Allaire while he (still) was head of tech at Macromedia. There are so many doing this right already, why can't Adobe just copy their success? We developers have no need for fancy javascript menus - we just want the reference and the gold that is contained deep within it. Just give us something without fancy design, framesets or Javscript. Why not make static pages with pre-parsed menus that always stay in context and some really good search functionality? J
by Jensa on 2007-03-23 13:55:59
Sometimes they don't work at all for me in Safari.
by Tink on 2007-03-23 14:02:17
I use http://gotapi.com/ which pulls in the pages from livedocs but seems to somehow be responsive...
by Kelvin Luck on 2007-03-23 14:16:29
Yeah, heaven forbid you attempt to access LiveDocs twice in Safari. The first load MIGHT work, the second probably not before you move onto something else, and completely forget why you opened LiveDocs. It's odd to me that developers of such powerful software don't have a super fast loading documentation page. It's just wierd. Wierd!! = }-
by LEE on 2007-03-23 14:30:32
At least ColdFusion developers have the AJAX-ified CFQuickDocs: http://www.cfquickdocs.com/
by Charlie on 2007-03-23 14:58:05
I have the CF docs I need installed on my local machine. I used Xampp as the http server. http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html Takes about 5 min to get it up and running. You can get the Flash docs in PDF format and that has a good search interface. Granted these are all workarounds and does not address the issue that Live Docs do indeed suck. I believe the only other interface with a suckitude value greater than Live Docs is the MM/Adobe's Developers Exchange. It has usability of a greased weasel.
by Cozmo on 2007-03-23 15:15:25
I've got a good tip too: - use: http://start.gotapi.com/ - with Firefox and this AdBlock filter: http://livedocs.adobe.com/*.js And enjoy fast doc browsing :)
by Philippe on 2007-03-23 15:38:51
Man live docs is such a bumber. I made a little site to search it as well as a few other sites. Check it out: http://noirgle.com
by Dustin Senos on 2007-03-23 18:19:58
( I am always looking for suggestions to add. For any of the languages listed. Please let me know )
by Dustin Senos on 2007-03-23 18:24:07
Oh hey, I neglected to mention, LiveDocs work pretty good for me in Firefox. Or was I just happy that they worked....
by LEE on 2007-03-24 05:36:30
How about exposing the livedocs as REST web services? Let different users consume them the way they want. Provide a basic Apollo-driven UI. Build the same connectivity into all the products, with the ability to fetch all of the docs and save them down as XML? There are so many possibilities in this area.
by Mike Britton on 2007-03-24 18:24:31
Great suggestion, Mike -- love it! REST would rock.
by aral on 2007-03-24 23:20:07
Yeah I hear that, a perfect example of when help isn't helpful
by Rob on 2007-03-28 09:20:01
I'm very glad to read Adobe is trying to remedy the problem. Really, not to point blame at anyone, but I remember attending a user group meeting shortly before the release of Flash 8 and personally asked Mike Downey, "are there any plans to fix Live Docs when you release Flash 8?" His answer was, not sarcastically, "Live Docs... what is that?" I was just kind of shocked by the answer. Obviously, there was a corporate/end-user disconnect with this part of the platform that we're still bitching about today.
by Michael Kaufman on 2007-03-30 23:23:16
If adobe wants as3 to be taken seriously and move away from the image of actionscript being a buggy language they should really fix their documentation, something which many developers including myself look at as a representation of how solid and refined the language is.
by matt schick on 2008-04-14 23:44:42
#3 google hit on "adobe livedocs problem" To make matters worse, it's now not even returning the correct documents. For the past week, I haven't been able to get consistent results. My daily routine is now http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/langref/ click DataGrid, and then traverse the inheritance hierarcy, today: failed on first click, RadioButton in Chinese for DataGrid I commented on one of the pages when it was working last week and got a response that they're aware of it, but can't get it to fail in a consistent way, but are working on it. We'll see. But, why can't I download a copy of the API docs? That's the ridiculous part.
by Bill Shirley on 2008-04-14 17:03:59