Flash For Learning

Well, I lost about three hours of work as Captivate 2 crashed on me (repeatedly) on a larger branching simulation I’m developing. This prompted me back to my personal Macbook Pro to work on my day-job project in Captivate 3.

Captivate 3 seems to be a bit better with memory management as an application and it “feels” more stable. I don’t know if it actually is or not, but I haven’t crashed yet, and I’m running via Parallels instead of native on my desktop. So that’s good for starters, right?

Turns out, importing Powerpoint has a minor, albeit interesting difference between Captivate 2 and 3, and that’s in how Captivate deals with any custom animation on a given PowerPoint slide. In Captivate 2, it ignores the animation so if you have a bunch of images stacked on top of each other with animations that make them appear and move (I don’t do it, but lot’s of other people do) — well, they’re just stuck there in a big glob when you import such a slide in Captivate 2. Not so with Captivate 3 — it actually respects your animations and your timing.

Now, the next question for me was working with Articulate. If you import audio via Articulate and then time animations to it using Articulate’s set of tools — and then import said slide into Captivate 3, Captivate 3 will ignore all custom timings you put in and it doesn’t import the audio.

I don’t know how much use people might have for this, but I often will create “Engage” type of activities with Captivate, importing slides from Powerpoint so that my Articulate projects have a unified User Interface — so the thought of being able to synchronize audio with animations in Articulate, to export to Captivate 2 to create tabbed interactions has been appealing.

But there are always slower, alternative ways of doing the same thing.

So, I bet you thought I was going dark again since it’s been almost a month without a post.

Actually, there’s been some moderate activity on the Flash For Learning grouplist. Not a ton of activity, but while there are many Flash developers and designers doing E-Learning, there’s probably not too many who are vocal. In the first month since the list was launched, we’ve got about 25 subscribers and maybe six people who post so far. Everyone’s in the same boat, realizing that there isn’t much out in the wild web on gearing Flash and related products for E-Learning. One of the members of the group is working on a full-on ActionScript class to handle the API communicaiton with SCORM. I’ve been hard at work doing something pressing that I’ll open up when I have it working.

Remember a few months back when I wrote about QA? I got a QA entry linking to a database working right out of Articulate Presenter as a tool in the upper right-hand corner. Honestly, it’s just a link to a URL, so it could be linked to anything, but the point is I have it working out of Articulate, using the LMS to provide your name when you enter a bug and Articulate to auto-fill the slide number you’re on, so all you have to do is tag what the problem is with keywords and then write a detailed description of the problem, and submit. The last week or two, I’ve been working on the management system to handle all that QA data, and I’m using it as an excuse to learn Flex 2 and AMFPHP 2.0 (currently in 1.9 beta 2). It’s fast, it’s effective, it’s efficient, it’s clean and neat — I’m surprised at how easy the combination of Flex 2 and AMFPHP 2 are to develop with. If I had tools like these when I was knocking out my first e-learning apps in 2001… well probably nothing would be different, but it sure would’ve been easier.

I’m currently gathering requirements to produce a learning game for my company. I won’t be developing it myself as the scope is just way too large for one guy to tackle. Right now we’re buying some serious games and we’re going to play and evaluate them at the same time we build the momentum from the businesses that will be served by this learning game for championing the project and get stakeholders identified and on-board. If anyone has experiences they’d like to share on the learning gaming front, I’d love to talk to you, as it’s completely foreign to me which makes it interesting to sell the idea of it to more conservative corporate types.

So this post isn’t really saying much except I’m alive, I’m active and communicating and there’s some pretty cool stuff going on that I’ll post here and on the Flash for Learning group.

Well, this beats the hell out of my reverse-engineering solution.

Last year when I picked up Articulate Presenter, we were awfully annoyed that even though we bought the mongo-license that included the SDK for Articulate AND paid the extra $500 to remove the “Powered by Articulate” logo on the bottom left of the screen, I still had that logo in there and there was no easy way to get rid of it.

A couple hours with SoThink did the trick and I was able to identify the exact movieclip to unload by importing a flash object into the first slide (and creating a custom background for Articulate slides in a vector format, but that’s another story).

But I was very happy to find after surfing around their support area that Articulate actually supports an official patch now to remove that “Powered by Articulate” logo, allowing you to create content that’s free and clear of their branding.

http://www.articulate.com/support/kb/000837.php

Hope this helps someone.

Ever need to launch several files out of one slide as a pop-up window in Articulate Presenter? I have that need and so do a few of the Instructional Designers I work with. So after some research and review, I’ve modified the player.html file in C:\Program Files\Articulate\Presenter\players 5.0\core and I can now publish content with abandon with custom flash pieces that can launch nice, clean pop-up windows.

When creating your Flash content, you’ll call a popup like this:

getURL( "javascript:popUpWindow('your_file.html',left,top,width,height);" );

where…

• left = a number indicating how many pixels off the left edge of the screen you want the popup to be placed (use 0 for the edge)
• top = a number indicating how many pixels off the top edge of the screen you want the popup to be placed (use 0 for the edge)
• width = a number indicating how wide you want the popup
• height = a number indicating how tall you want the popup.

You can download the modified player.html file here.

A helpful tip, courtesy of my man, Ted.