Dave Mozealous

Wistia

2011-04-13T10:08:00.001-07:00

Screenr test

2011-02-07T09:09:00.001-08:00

Flash on Non-PC Devices blog

2008-07-05T11:14:00.000-07:00

Pretty interesting blog here by Bill Perry, a product evangelist for mobile devices at Adobe.

So far it seems that Flash and Flash lite haven't been widely adopted by mobile devices, but with Microsoft licensing Flash Lite for Windows Mobile, and with what Bill Perry says about adding some form of Flash to the iPhone, it will be interesting to see if this changes over the next couple of years.

Free Sound Effects

2008-05-19T14:25:00.000-07:00

I have been working on two presentations lately, one on Zombies, and one on Scuba diving and I needed some sound effects for my presentation. I found The Free Sound Project which a collaborative database of Creative Commons licensed sounds.

I was able to find both Zombie sounds, and sounds from a scuba diver. Pretty cool site if you need some sound effects to liven up your training.

Adobe Presenter deletes Articulate Presenter project files??

2008-04-24T17:02:00.000-07:00

Ok, spent the last day and a half chasing around this very nasty bug in Adobe Presenter 6.1 and felt compeled to blog about it.

I couldn't for the life of me figure out why the SWFs and FLVs that I had inserted via Articulate Presenter were magically getting deleted from my system. It turned out that the system I was using also had Adobe Presenter 6.1 installed on it. Even after removing Articulate Presenter, Adobe Presenter still continued to delete my non-Adobe Presenter project files.

See the steps and screen grabs below for a step-by-step account of what happens.

1. Install Articulate Presenter 5

2. Create a new PowerPoint presentation

3. Insert a SWF via Articulate Presenter

4. Notice this project folder is created

5. Notice the project folder contains the SWF I inserted

6. I uninstalled Articulate Presenter

7. Verified the SWF I inserted was still in the project folder

8. I installed Adobe Presenter

9. Hit Save in PowerPoint

10. AHHHHHH...Notice my SWF just disappeared from my Articulate Presenter project folder

In case you are wondering, this only seems to happen when you have Adobe Presenter on your system, and I am not really sure what versions of Adobe Presenter are affected.

So, if you have wondered why files seem to mysteriously get deleted from your system, you might want to check and make sure that Adobe Presenter did not delete them.

Note: I kid you not, this really happens, and I know a lot of potential customers of ours and Adobes might trial both products, so if you decided to purchase our software, I would strongly suggest uninstalling Adobe Presenter if you ever had it installed.

Odds and Ends

2008-03-14T08:46:00.000-07:00

It has been awhile since I have posted. Caught a bit of the flu about 2 weeks ago and I am still recovering.

First things first. Check out this auction going on at eBay right now for a Zombie Survival kit. A friend sent this to me a couple of days ago, the kit is now selling for $280. I soo wish I had this in my office, but at $280 it is a bit steep. But can you really place a price on protection from Zombies?

Also, congratulations to Gabe on winning the first Articulate Miles Challenge. Gabe ran over 95 miles during the 30 days of the challenge. We had some late comers to the contest who ended up doing rather well (Magnus and Robert).

We also just yesterday started the second Articulate Miles Challenge and now feature 5 Articulate employees in the challenge. See how everyone is doing below. Good luck everyone.

Interview with Jonathan Ive

2008-03-04T14:08:00.000-08:00

Feeling a little ill today, but wanted to post this video I stumbled across last night. It is an interview with Jonathan Ive designer of the iPhone, iPod and iMac.

The Dave vs Gabe - Articulate Miles Challenge

2008-02-12T15:52:00.000-08:00

The 1st Annual Dave vs Gabe Articulate Miles Challenge has begun!!!

Gabe and I are both in the process of training for upcoming half marathons. I am running the La Jolla 1/2 Marathon on April 27th and Gabe (as well as Justin from Customer Support and Sarah from Sales) is running the Nashville 1/2 Marathon.

Gabe Anderson, the Director of Customer Support for Articulate, and I have a challenge going through Nike+! Gabe just bought the Nike+ kit and an iPod Nano to match mine and we setup a challenge to motivate us to keep up the training.

What is the challenge?
It is pretty simple. Who can run the most miles in the next 30 days.

Sounds great! How can I find out who is winning the challenge?
Check out the little widget below that updates with real time progress.

Can I join?
Sure, if you have a Nike+ Kit and a compatible iPod post a comment to this blog with your Nike+ username and I'll invite you to the challenge.

Good luck Gabe...you are going to need it!!! :-)

Optimal size for a presenter's photo

2008-02-06T17:33:00.001-08:00

Ever notice how your presenter photo has some gray area below or above it? Prevent this from happening by using the perfectly sized photo.

The optimal zie for a presenter photo is 72x84. This will prevent any unwanted grey area above, below or on the side of a presenter photo.

Hilarious Photoshop tutorials

2008-01-28T23:02:00.000-08:00

Donnie Hoyle has created some very hilarious Photoshop tutorials titled "You suck at Photoshop" that have become rather popular on the net lately. If you haven't seen them you should check out the one below.

Donnie's brand of self-deprecating humor is seriously funny. I have been trying to get better at Photoshop but always get bored stiff about 5 minutes into any tutorial I have started watching. Cheers to Donnie for making some classic training that I could watch for hours.

Some of the humor is a little over the top, and might not be all that work appropriate due to some explicit language, but really, it is very funny.

Get a professional looking presenter photo cheap

2008-01-25T09:18:00.000-08:00

A while back I wrote a developer center article for Macromedia's Captivate (view it here). The profile pic I had taken of me for the article came out horrible and now I am stuck with that photo attached to the article. This was before I started using cartoon images for my profile pic.

Well, if you have run into the scenario where you need a high quality profile photo and don't want to end up in the same boat I did check out Pixoo.us. Pixoo will enhance your image by using Adobe® Photoshop® software and take your crummy looking profile pic and turn it into a professional looking photo for only $9.90.

Top 8 changes at Articulate

2008-01-24T20:29:00.001-08:00

Last Wednesday (the 16th) marked my two year anniversary with Articulate and I wanted to take some time and reflect on some of the significant changes that have taken place at Articulate since I have worked here. The company has grown significantly since I began working here and some of changes I had some influence on, others I had next to none, but regardless it has been an exciting 2 years.

Here are the TOP 8 MOST significant changes that have taken place since I started working at Articulate.

Dave's Top 8 changes at Articulate in the past 2 years

Articulate has released Articulate Engage. Articulate Engage has enabled thousands of customers to create stunning interactive flash content without the having to know or learn flash. Articulate Engage was the first significant addition to Articulate's product line since Quizmaker.
Articulate has launched Articulate Online. With the goal of allowing users to easily and cost effectively deploy and track e-learning activity without the normal hassle of an Learning Management System has launched with great success. Articulate Online has quickly matured into a great alternative to the traditionally difficult to use, expensive to implement Learning Management Systems.
Articulate has launched the Articulate Forums. With the help of our customers and especially our MVPs the Articulate forums have rapidly become not only a great avenue of getting support, but also for establishing a community for e-Learning developers.
Articulate.com was completely redesigned. Check out the previous design of the site on the internet archive.
Tom Kuhlmann has launched the Rapid E-Learning Blog - now with over 15,000 readers.
Articulate Presenter has released three updates (5.1, 5.2 and 5.3) which includes Engage support, Articulate Online support, and Vista/Office 2k7 support respectively.
Articulate Quizmaker has released two updates (2.1, 2.2)
Mozealous.com has been redesigned 3 times (man I had some ugly initial designs). Check out these initial designs, initial design, cartoon design, and you are looking at the current design.

Also note, I am sporting a new avatar. Check out the new South Park Dave with beard. I have been growing a beard since December 31st so I decided it was time to update my avatar to reflect it.

Free PowerPoint Templates!

2008-01-21T10:29:00.000-08:00

I read Tom's post the other day, The Secret to Creating Your Own PowerPoint Templates for E-Learning, and was inspired to create a couple of PowerPoint templates of my own.

The Simpsons

The first PowerPoint template I created was a template created to look like The Simpson's TV. I was inspired to create this template because I was watching an episode of The Simpsons while reading Tom's blog.

Font used in the template is "Akbar" which is a font that mimics Matt Groening's handwriting. The font is embedded so you should be able to use it in the template provided.

Template probably isn't highly useful unless you are creating training or a presentation on The Simpsons, but it looks cool.

Download The Simpsons template

Note: It appears as though there were issues with using the font contained in this template. To use this font you can download and install the font from here:

Akbar Font

iMac Template

The next template I created was inspired by the new Apple iMacs. After reading Tom's blog I went to the mall to do some shopping and stopped in the Apple store. I was amazed at the new designs of the iMacs. The displays are unbelievable.

Font used in this template is Lucida Grande, which is a common mac font, and it too is embedded in the presentation for your use.

The iMac template also probably is not all that useful for training, unless you are Apple, but if you replace the Apple logo with your logo it could be used for non-Apple related training/presentations.

Download the iMac template

Yesterday was suckie

2008-01-16T13:35:00.000-08:00

Let me first apologize for the downtime some Articulate Online users experienced yesterday. I realize this was a tremendous inconvenience for everyone effected and I am really sorry this happened.

At about 5:30 AM PST time yesterday I began to receive lots of emails, phone calls, and instant messages that Articulate Online was down. Over the next several hours I was frantically trying to figure out what caused the outage, who was affected, and how long it would take to fix. The problem that occurred caught us completely by surprise, but I wanted to take some time to explain what happened and how we will prevent this from happening in the future.

In case you do not know, I am the Quality Assurance Project Lead for Articulate Online, and it is my responsibility to get things Articulate Online up and running in such events.

So what did happen yesterday?

Early yesterday morning our datacenter brought a new server online that had a conflicting MAC/IP address with our primary Articulate Online IP. This caused traffic that was being routed to us to never make it past the network switch.

We noticed this issue very early in the morning and quickly contacted our datacenter to have the problem resolved. Unfortunately it took our datacenter much longer to identify the problem than we could have imagined, and once it was identified it took them much longer than anticipated to fix the problem.

We have used that datacenter in the past, and in the past have been satisfied with their level of service, but the problems yesterday forced us to lose some confidence in their ability to quickly and effectively handle these issues. I spent several hours on the phone with our datacenter yesterday, and I am truly disappointed it took as long to fix as it did.

So what took so long to fix the problem?

When the issue was originally identified we assumed it would only take about 20 minutes to address the problem and we became increasingly frustrated that it was taking as long as it was. The problem was originally diagnosed by our datacenter as a problem with a network driver on one of our servers, but after updating the driver there was no change. After it was identified that the driver was not at fault it took our datacenter a considerable amount of time to identify the correct issue with the MAC/IP address conflict, and to find the server that caused that issue. After the server was identified and taken offline it took our datacenter even more time to bring back our server back online.

We had contemplated during the downtime switching to our backup systems as well as redirecting any traffic at the DNS level to a status page to inform our customers what was going on. We decided initially against making any changes at the DNS level to reroute any traffic to a status page because DNS changes can often take hours to take effect, so downtime would only be exacerbated by making such a change. We also decided against doing a failover to our mirrored systems because we only thought we were 20 minutes away from the problem being fixed and that it would require a longer period of time to get the mirrored systems running and would have also required some DNS/IP changes that would have taken time.

When it became apparent that the fix was going to take longer than anticipated we did start updating our DNS server to redirect traffic that was going to Articulate Online to a status page that would give updates as to Articulate Online status. However, just as we were beginning to get the status pages up the problem was addressed.

In retrospect, we could have handled this better on our end in regards to failing over to our backup system in a more timely manner. We are working on improving our own internal process to make our resorting to our backup an easier and quicker process.

What is being done to ensure this will not happen again?

Making sure that this does not happen again is a priority for us. We have had several meetings to discuss what can be done to prevent something similar from happening in the future.

Here are the steps that we are going to take over the next month to prevent this from happening again:

1.New datacenter - We are currently working on migrating our existing servers to a datacenter that provides a more reliable infrastructure and support system. Rackspace is a Tier 1 datacenter and is widely recognized as one of the best datacenters. We are committed to migrating to the new datacenter within the next 30 days.

2.Improved communication – We just today created a new site (http://heartbeat.articulate.com/) that will give real time status updates of the health of Articulate Online and our other resources. We have also included a RSS feed for the page so that you can subscribe to it to see any changes to the health of AO.

3.Improved failover process – I just had a couple hour meeting with internal employees of Articulate where we discussed ideas for how we can improve the failover process. In the upcoming weeks we are going to make some changes to our failover process to make it easier and quicker to switch to our backup systems.

Once again, I am really sorry for yesterday, it was really awful for all parties involved. If you have any feedback to give, I would be more than happy to listen, and feel free to post any comments that you may have.

There is also a forum thread where we describe what took place yesterday, and covers this all in less technical detail:
Articulate Online back online. Downtime explained.

-Dave

Adding Sony, that makes it 4 of 4

2008-01-13T11:36:00.000-08:00

I posted last month an article (Amazon's MP3 store is better than Apple's) about how 3 of the 4 major record labels now distribute DRM-free music via Amazon's MP3 store. Well, Amazon just announced that they have reached an agreement with Sony BMG to distribute its catalog via there store, which now makes 4 of the 4 major record labels to reach such an agreement.

In July of 2007 iTunes surpassed Amazon to become the 3rd largest distributor of music in terms of sales, but that statistic includes physical CD sales. It will be interesting to see how this changes over the next year now that Amazon offers a bigger catalog for DRM-free music in downloadable MP3 format.

The AO prototype

2008-01-11T17:24:00.000-08:00

Alright all you Articulate Online users. .. Here is the Articulate Online that never was.

This is one of the original, prototype designs for Articulate Online and it was what Articulate Online almost looked like.

This is actually the second design of Articulate Online, the first one was so ugly that it will never see the light of day.

Things that really stick out about this design:

1. Has a real alien feel (alien as in UFO and little green men)
2. Articulate Online logo is really, really small
3. Very dark and drab
4. Bad use of screen real estate

We tried really hard to make the screen width be viewable without horizontal scrolling at desktop resolutions of 800x600 with this design, so this design is really narrow. This is a common mistake of many websites, they design for 800x600 and very few people still run resolutions that small, and the people that do, probably are not going to be buying our software.

We also use a considerable amount of real estate for the notes on the right, when this stuff is likely never going to be read, and adds nothing to the value of the program.

Initially we went with a design approach where each page was dedicated to a different function. The page above was all about access, controlling who could and who couldn't access your content. We had a separate page for inviting users, setting permissions, and another page for collecting guestbook information. It is not apparent in this design how you get to those other features.

Compare the design above, with the design to the left. Notice how clean, and easy this feels?

The colors are much brighter, and don't make you feel as though you are watching an episode of the X-files.

We also consolidated everything you would want to do on a single page. Everything you would want to do with this content is right there. You can quickly and easily run reports, assign permissions, setup the guestbook, and invite users. Everything that you had to do in several busy pages in the old design were put on a single clean page. We fit more in on a single page, but made it a lot easier.

The old design was hard and dark, and the new design is light and "cheery". The initial design was done in February, and the later design was done in summer, maybe that influenced the designers.

It is pretty interesting looking back at this and seeing how the design changed so much.

SCORM 2004 4th Edition

2007-12-31T14:45:00.000-08:00

The SCORM 2004 3rd edition was just released within the last year (I think) and the SCORM technical writing group has announced plans for SCORM 2004 4th edition.

Mike Rustici of scorm.com blogs about it here. He has some interesting things to say about the update, and how he feels it is necessary for progress. Also contains some interesting comments on a possible upcoming SCORM 2.0, which is in his words, "a radical update and restructuring to take advantage of how technology has evolved over since the original inception of SCORM and its underlying specifications nearly a decade ago."

Mike Rustici is THE guy to talk to when it comes to SCORM/LMS integration, so his post makes for an interesting read.

Interesting article on eLearning

2007-12-30T17:06:00.001-08:00

Check out this article at Yahoo that discusses among other things eLearning, and MITs OpenCourseWare initiative which is enabling some serious distance learning:

Internet opens elite colleges to all.

Amazon's MP3 store is better than Apple's

2007-12-28T15:55:00.000-08:00

So I read the article 3 down, 1 to go: Warner Music Group drops DRM last night and decided to check it out. I have been really happy with the ease of ordering music from Apple's iTunes in the past, they really pioneered selling music on the web, and have made purchasing music and transferring it to my iPod dead simple.

What compelled me to check out Amazon's MP3 service?

The main reason I was interested in it is that music purchased from Amazon is DRM-Free. For those that don't know, DRM means Digital Rights Management, which "is an umbrella term that refers to access control technologies used by publishers and copyright holders to limit usage of digital media or devices." - wikipedia. Since the music I purchase is DRM free it means I can easily copy it to any device I own, including my laptop, my iPod, my new iPhone, or my desktop without any limitations, which is nice because I have so many devices.

The real significance of the announcement mentioned in the article is that "EMI, Universal, and Warner now offer their catalogues in DRM-free digital formats," on Amazon.com, which constitutes 3 of the major music labels to come to such an agreement.

The thing that bothers me so much about the DRM that Apple/iTunes uses is that it is way to restrictive, and way to difficult to backup. So far I have purchased 3 movies, and 1 season pass for a TV show, and of all those videos that I have purchased I can't get them on all the devices that I want and own because I downloaded them to different computers. If I purchased them, shouldn't I have the freedom to put them on any device that I choose? This also pisses me off about my DVDs...I have about 100 DVDs, but I can't easily transfer them to my computer, iPod, or iPhone without jumping through a bunch of hoops.

Well, enough on the DRM-Free aspect of Amazon's service, there are some other benefits too, such as price. So far I have purchased two albums from Amazon, and both were only $8.99, which is cheaper than iTunes standard $9.99 per album for music.

There is also an added benefit of increased quality of the music purchased form Amazon over iTunes. The majority of music purchased through iTunes has a bit rate of 128kbps, where as Amazon's music is all 320kbps (Correction, it is 256kbps or higher). For those that don't know...higher bit rate means higher quality. From what I am told the human ear can't notice any sound quality difference at a bit rate over 192kbps, but it can distinguish the difference for anything less than that. So Amazon's music should have a noticeable quality upgrade over Apple's.

So to sum everything up, Amazon's mp3 store is better than iTunes because:

It is DRM free
It is cheaper than iTunes
It is better quality

The only time I can see going back to purchase any music from iTunes is if Amazon doesn't sell it. Try it out if you are the type that buys music online. I don't think you will be disappointed.

I'm Back!

2007-12-14T12:35:00.000-08:00

I am back! It has been a long time since I posted last. Have been really busy at Articulate working on some pretty big stuff and haven't had much of a chance to give any updates here.

Thanks Mike for posting your comment and inspiring me to post again.

We completed the MS 150 back in October on a couple of cold and rainy days. The second day wasn't too bad, but for about half of the ride on the first day it was raining or drizzling making the ride a little miserable. But hey, the ride was for a good cause, and we helped raise over $22,000 as an 8 man team! It really is incredible. I personally have raised over $2500 for the event, which puts me just outside of the top 150 fund raisers in the event. If I make it into the top 150 fund raisers I get a special jersey next year and entrance into the club 150 tent, which I am sure is pretty sweet. Today is the last day for fund raising, so I think at the end of the day I think I am just going to have to sneak in a donation to myself in order to get me over the top.

The picture above was taken of Ajay, Mark Firger, and I as we were about to cross the finish line on the second day. The picture on the left is of day one as we were about to start riding through Camp Pendleton. The event was a amazing and something that I won't soon forget. The ride itself was more difficult than I imagined, and I learned that you don't "grow into" a bike that is too big for you. By the end of the first day (roughly 108 miles) my back and neck were so soar that anything but lying down, and drinking excessive amounts of beer caused intense pain.

I really appreciate all the support that everyone gave me. The people that I work with at Articulate, and many readers of this blog were more than generous in their support. My original goal was to raise $2000, and I really didn't expect to get anywhere near that goal. But our team got really competitive when it came to fund raising, and it really inspired me.

Thanks again to all those that donated.

Look forward to more blog posting coming up in '08!

An MS 150 Update

2007-10-05T10:51:00.000-07:00

Last month I posted about my upcoming bike ride in the MS 150, and I had several comments from people asking that I send a status update, so here it is.

So far we have raised over $17,000 in donations by our team of 8, and I am only a couple hundred short of my goal of personally raising $2000.

As a team, most of us have been training together pretty regularly in preparation for the ride. We usually go out once a weekend and try to do a longer ride in the 60-70 mile range. I am feeling confident that everyone will be able to finish the ride.

We did have one hiccup last week however. One of our riders (Mark Wineman) was out riding when a truck did a left turn right in front of him as he was going 30 mph down the road. A short trip to the hospital, and a new bike later he is ready to ride again. You can see the aftermath of what happened to his bike on the left.

I really want to thank all those that donated. It really is a tremendous help, and with your support we have raised over $17,000 in donations.

I'll make sure that I post photos of the event after the ride.

If you are still interested in donating it isn't too late. You can donate using the link below:

DONATE TODAY

Free eLearning Courses

2007-10-03T14:56:00.000-07:00

Check out this list of Free Education Courses online.

It is a list of free videos from Berkley courses.

Topics from Berkley include:

Computers
Biology
Health
Engineering
Math
Other various courses

The page also has several great resources on the left hand side of the page including links to other educational videos, links to learn foreign languages and so on.

This is a great resource.

Quizmaker results to a database

2007-09-13T22:48:00.000-07:00

I spent a couple of hours the other day looking at, and trying out the instruction in this forum post by Joep on the Articulate Community forums and I must say, it is pretty impressive what he has done.

Joe has created a C# web application that will capture results from Articulate Quizmaker quizzes and store them in a SQL database.

See the original post here:
Quiz to database, instructions and code

Below I have listed some initial impressions.

Positives:

Probably more reliable than sending results via email (because of technical limitations of browsers and email clients)
If you have a free Windows Server with IIS the cost is only the time it takes to setup

Drawbacks:

Requires a Windows Server with IIS
Pretty technically challenging to setup (not for novice non-IT people)
Requires modification to the quizmaker.html file after each publish
Only works in IE (at least it didn't work for me in Firefox, but if you are using a Windows Server with IIS you probably likely in an environment that requires IE)
Doesn't match the feature set you will get from Articulate Online or an LMS

It is pretty cool what Joe has done, and although I would recommend going with a more complete solution such as Articulate Online for capturing quiz results, Joe's method does provide users with very limited budgets an alternative to emailing quiz results as a method for capturing quiz results.

Good work Joe!

Free stock photos

2007-09-11T22:36:00.000-07:00

If you ever need to spice up your presentations with photos, but are lacking good stock photography, and don't want to pay an arm and a leg for photos, check out stock.xchng.

Stock.xchng is a site that distributes FREE stock photography. This is a pretty good resource for anyone looking for stock photos for presentations or web design.

Check it out at:
http://www.sxc.hu/

Most of the photos do have some limitations on what they can be used for, but most of the limitations are pretty minor (like notifying the creator if used publicly).

I need your help

2007-08-27T17:29:00.000-07:00

Today I am blogging because I need your help!

This fall, I am riding over 150 miles in the 25th annual MS Bike Tour, a fundraiser for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, and I need your help. On October 13 & 14th, 2007 over 2000 cyclists will raise over two million dollars and ride together along Southern California’s coast to bring the dream of conquering MS closer to reality. The money raised from this event will fund continuing research to discover the cause and cure for multiple sclerosis. Equally important, it will help pay for a multitude of support services, critical to those whose lives has been touched by MS.

I will be riding in the event with two of my good friends, Ajay Madiah and Mark Firger.

Mark Firger’s mom (Linda) has been diagnosed with MS, and this ride will benefit will help Linda, and people like Linda win the battle against MS.

Ajay Madiah (pic on right) is one of my best friends and in January was diagnosed with cancer. Ajay has since won the battle against cancer, and has joined me in the battle against MS!

Ajay Madiah and Mark Firger are the reason I am riding in this event, and hope to raise over $2000 in the fight against MS.

I have become active in the fight against MS, and I will riding over 150 miles on my bike. You can join me in my fight against MS...YOU CAN SPONSOR ME. Your support, no matter what the amount, will benefit the hundreds of thousands fighting the MS battle.

Will you please consider helping me? You can donate online by clicking the link below.

Donate Here!

Also note, any donation is tax deductible, and I truly appreciate any donation that you can give.

iQuiz for the iPod as a training tool

2007-08-06T17:31:00.001-07:00

One of the things I am most interested in when it comes to eLearning is eLearning content that is developed for portable devices such as the iPod. I was pretty excited when I saw that iTunes launched iTunes University.

Well, a new game has been developed by Apple called iQuiz, which is a trivia game for the iPod. It allows you to play downloaded "trivia packs" on the iPod.

So you can create these "trivia packs" for your learners so that they can take your quizzes on their iPods. Cool, huh?

What I like about it:

The UI - The games look and feel is cool. Really feels like you are playing a game. The animations are really slick as well.
Ability to create timed quizzes
3 strikes your out - Some of the quizzes have a "loose" value. A loose value is the number of wrong answers that result in losing the game

Unfortunately there are a couple of things that prevent this from becoming a really effective tool for deploying eLearning material:

No way to capture results - This makes it an ineffective tool at it as tool for assessing student retention of information. It would be nice if users could take the quiz, and then have the results uploaded to a database or LMS when the user synchronized their iPod.
No way to provide custom feedback - Only default feedback is displayed (correct/incorrect). So it is difficult to use quizzes as an effective tool.
End user must have iQuiz installed - Which means any user who wants to take your quizzes will have to have iQuiz installed.
Installing the quizzes is not intuitive - Quizzes need to be copied to the \My Music\iTunes\iPod Games\iQuiz folder, and there is no ability to manage your quizzes in iTunes.

So basically the game is more about trivia than it is quizzing. But anyways, I think the program is interesting, and in a follow-up blog post I will post instructions for how you can create quizzes (trivia packs) for iQuiz, and instructions on how you can copy the quizzes to your iPod.

Learn more about the iPod in Education.

iQuiz for the iPod.

Doofdaddy launches his blog

2007-08-05T09:12:00.000-07:00

On Friday Tom Kuhlmann (otherwise known as Doofdaddy), launched his blog on Rapid eLearning.

This is a great resource for anyone interested in developing any type of eLearning material. One of the most compelling aspects of the blog is that he focuses on eLearning without being biased to Articulate tools. So in other words, the blog isn't a marketing tool for Articulate.

If you get a chance, take a look at the blog, and subscribe to it. By subscribing to the blog you get access to Tom's 46-page eBook on developing Rapid eLearning.

http://www.articulate.com/rapid-elearning/

Scaling Quizmaker Quiz

2007-07-19T16:07:00.000-07:00

Want a Quizmaker Quiz that will scale to fit in your browser window regardless of the size?

Here is how you can do it:

Download the this zip file.
Publish your quiz from Quizmaker as you normally would
Add the contents of the zip file to your published output (it will replace two files)

This is useful if you want the quiz to scale, so that the browser doesn't display scroll bars.

Example

Articulate Online now X times faster!!!!

2007-06-21T11:07:00.000-07:00

Last evening we rolled out a significant update to Articulate Online that contains many new improvements.

Not that Articulate Online has ever been slow to respond, but a big portion of this release was targeted toward improving the performance and speed of the site. As Articualte Online's user base continues to scale, we wanted to get out this release to ensure that Articulate Online would continue to perform optimally as our user base grew.

So if you are browsing around Articulate Online today, you might notice that the site is a little faster.

Other features we added in this release:

Ability to make content private by default (availible under Settings tab>Other Settings)
Removed ability to see attempt detail report in the user portal when history reports are turned off
A boat load of bug fixes

For more detailed info on the bug fixes see the Articulate Online 1.5 release notes.

How many sales does this cost them?

2007-06-14T16:17:00.000-07:00

Today I went to purchase a tool called HTTP Analyzer from IE Inspector. It is a really great tool for looking behind the scenes when content is loading from a website.

Problem is that when I went to purchase the tool I was asked for the billing address of the credit card I was using. My corporate card is billed to New York. Check out the list of states I was presented with on the left. How easily can you find New York?

I wonder how many sales this costs them?

iTunes U

2007-05-30T08:02:00.000-07:00

Today Apple announced the launch of iTunes U.

iTunes U is a "dedicated area within the iTunes Store (www.itunes.com) featuring free content such as course lectures, language lessons, lab demonstrations, sports highlights and campus tours provided by top US colleges and universities including Stanford University, UC Berkeley, Duke University and MIT."

The content currently is a little unusable (poor video quality, difficult to follow), but I love to see this happening. They got some pretty great universities to buy into this (Standford, Duke, MIT) with some pretty good programs.

I love to see that eLearning targeted for college age students is being created for devices that almost all students have (iPods). This makes learning "hip".

Way to go Apple, and the universities that signed up for this.

Geek Fonts

2007-05-17T22:20:00.000-07:00

Ok, I have to admit it. I am a huge dork for fonts. I love using fonts that are used in Movies, TV Shows, posters, etc. I just ran across a site that links to the "Top 25 Geek Fonts" that are free to download.

Some of the cooler fonts offered:

Star Wars (pictured above)
Goonies
Ghost Busters
X-Files

Check them out at the link below:

Top 25 Geek Fonts

MeetingSense and Joost

2007-05-16T17:55:00.000-07:00

Today I wanted to pimp a couple software tools that I have been using lately that I thought deserved some blog love.

MeetingSense

MeetingSense is an application/add-on to Outlook from Yon Software. MeetingSense is a tool that allows you to easily, and intuitively track meeting minutes, assign tasks from meetings and manage your meeting agenda.

It is a great tool for keeping track of decisions that are made in meetings, and for assuring that tasks that are discussed get completed.

Some of the cool features of MeetingSense:

Add action items to meetings that get automatically created as tasks in outlook

Automatically send meeting summaries to all participants in the meeting (this is key for getting follow through on action items)

Archiving of past meetings (which is searchable)

Basically it is what you want Outlook meetings to be. It is kind of like Outlook meetings on steroids.

Joost

Joost is the latest project from the founders of Skype and Kazaa and in short Joost is "a new way of watching TV on the web." Yeah, I know what you are thinking, you have probably heard the same thing about Youtube. But Joost is different...the content is good.

So what is the difference between Joost and other video on the web? Basically I see it as there being two types of video on the web:

1. Youtube type content
2. Professional content

Youtube content is uploaded by users all around the world, and is usually illegally uploaded copyrighted content, mildly pornographic, incredibly lame, or some combination of the three. The positive of this video is that the content is presented, for the most part, commercially free.

The professional content, such as ESPN and Yahoo video, is usually pretty good, but it is usually displayed in a very small area, and bloated with more ads than content. So you have to sit through 30 seconds of commercials to see a 30 second video highlight of some incredible shot in last nights basketball game in a 300x300 pixel area.

What makes Joost different from Youtube and Professional content is that it contains a wide array of channels, such as National Geographic, Cartoon Network, Extreme Sports, but not in short segments like most other professional content on the web. They allow you to watch the full program of TV content, with few commercial interruptions. Since it is professional content it doesn't contain much of the crap that appears on youtube.

Joost also allows you to watch the entire programs in high-quality full -screen mode, so you don't have to squint to view the content.

Currently Joost is still in beta, and you can only beta Joost if you have been invited by another Joost user. Luckily, I am a Joost user, so if you are interested in participating in the Joost beta add a comment to this blog posting with your email address (but don't include that @ symbol in your email address so you don't get picked up by spam bots) and I'll forward you a Joost beta invitation.

For more information on Joost visit any of the links below:

Joost.com

Joost Promtional Video

Presenter Video with FLV On2 Codec

2007-05-11T10:34:00.000-07:00

Ever try to use Presenter Video created using the On2 VP6 codec and have problems with it displaying in Articulate Presenter?

How can you get On2VP6 Presenter video to display in Articulate Presenter?

Insert your On2 VP6 FLV as you normally would insert Presenter Video
Publish to your desired output
Navigate to your output directory
Open the "data" folder
Open the "presentation.xml" file in notepad
Find this chunk of XML:

Modify the width and height value to match your desired width and height for the video
Save the file
View your output

Note: Currently Articulate Presenter 5 does not support FLVs created with the On2VP6 codec, that is why you have to use this workaround. The issue is that when AP5 came out the On2VP6 codec had not been released, and at that time, we couldn't correctly determine the dimensions of the FLV.

Also, FLVs created with the On2VP6 codec will only display in Flash Player 8 and later.

I love Skype but..

2007-04-06T15:05:00.000-07:00

...do they ever make some bad UI decisions.

Given the context of the "Close Account" button here, right next to your account details, what would you think the "Close Account" button does? If you have a Skype account, I dare you to click it and find out. :-)

Note: Clicking Close Account doesn't actually close your account, it just minimizes this section of the dialog.

Thanks Arlyn for this.

Happy Friday everyone.

Articulate Online now with User Portal!

2007-04-03T22:35:00.000-07:00

We just added a significant new feature to Articulate Online.

Since the release of Articulate Online back in January, one of the suggestions that we have heard time and time again from customers is that they wanted a "User Portal" in Articulate Online. To show you that we are listening, today we added a User Portal to Articulate Online!

Question: What is a "User Portal"?

Answer: The Articulate Online "User Portal" is a place where your private users can securely login to a personalized training site to view and access all content items that administrators or publishers have assigned to them.

When we originally designed Articulate Online we didn't include a "User Portal" because we wanted to focus on creating a platform for easily hosting training content that could then be incorporated in existing websites, blogs, or linked to in emails sent to users. I think we did a pretty great job on this front.

However, shortly after release of Articulate Online in January we started to get requests from customers who also wanted a "User Portal" added to Articulate Online as another means of distributing their training. They wanted a place where users could login, view a list of content they are assigned to view and be able to view the content.

Question: So what does the "User Portal" include?

Answer: By enabling the "User Portal" in Articulate Online, you have the option of allowing your users to do the following in the "User Portal":

Show a list of all content items the users is given permission to view
Show user history reports
Enable users to print the History report (a list of all items viewed) or Attempt Detail report (a print out of the specific attempt at a quiz), which can be used as a completion certificate
Manage their e-mail address and password settings in the "User Portal"
Give your users a customized message in the "User Portal"

Question: Cool, so what is this going to cost me?

Answer: Nothing! Great part about it is that all of our existing plans will be able to enable the "User Portal" in Articulate Online, so it won't cost you a thing.

So that's it. I hope you guys like the "Users Portal" and thanks for reading my blog. :-)

For more information on the User Portal visit this Knowledge Base article.

Exactly...

2007-04-02T19:48:00.000-07:00

Want to know why Articulate Online was designed the way it was?

Much of Articulate Online's design actually came from what we found users didn't like about their current learning management systems.

Check out this presentation that explains the top 6 complaints we heard about traditional Learning Management Systems, and how we attempted to address those complaints in Articulate Online:

Articulate Online Demo (19:41)

Here are the main points that stuck out in the presentation:

AO must Do the core things well (like reporting)

AO must be Simple and easy to use (and not filled with complex unnecessary features)

Great presentation, I couldn't have said it better myself.

FLV use in low-bandwidth situations

2007-03-28T20:43:00.000-07:00

Do you use FLV video in your Presentations, Engage interactions, or in any Flash content for that matter, and get feedback from users that either the video plays poorly (is choppy), or takes a significant amount of time to display?

This can happen if you use FLV video that is optimized for high-bandwidth situations, but your users are operating in a low-bandwidth environment, such as dial-up modem, or slow DSL connection. Most of the programs that create FLV video allow you to specify a compression setting for the video, where you can specify the output FLV in terms of the target bandwidth rate of the end viewer. It is a good idea to compress your FLV to a level that matches your target audiences bandwidth (for example, you wouldn't want to create an FLV that is optimized for a high-bandwidth situation if your targeted viewers are all using a 56k modem to view your presentation or interaction).

Some of the popular FLV creation programs are:

Sorenson Squeeze

Sorenson allows you to select any number of predefined compression settings, that are labeled rather intelligently based on target bandwidth rate. For example, they have a 56k_Dial_Up predefined setting that is a good compression settings if your users will be viewing the FLV over a 56k modem.

Below I have created a sample movie that shows you how you can apply a compression setting in Sorenson Squeeze.

Flash Video Encoder

Flash Video Encoder has options that are similar to Sorenson Squeeze, but they call it "Quality" in Flash Video Encoder. So lower "Quality" video will be more compressed. Unfortunately they only have quality settings that go down to 150 kbps, which is a compression setting that is targeted for a faster connection than a 56k modem.

Flash Video Encorder is included with Flash Professional, but the available options for quality settings are much more limited than Sorenson's options for compression settings.

Sothink Video Encoder for Adobe Flash

The Sothink Video Encoder allows you to specify "Profiles" (shown below) that allow you to target your output FLV for various bandwidth speeds. The available profiles range from 56 Kbps to 2.1 Mbps.

Note: Video compression is "lossy", meaning the more it is compressed, the lower the quality. Click here for more info on video compression.

Usability of ESPN.com

2007-03-22T15:47:00.000-07:00

Doug LeMoine blogs about how the usability of ESPN.COM has deteriorated. At one time in my life I would read ESPN.com several times a day, but now it is so filled with adds, and pop-ups and garbage I can't read it any more.

See the picture below. The highlighted and arrowed 300x500 pixel area is the only real content in a page that is 1260x3000 pixels.

I actually had a tough time trying to highlight the area I viewed as actual content. The colors are so bright on the page it makes it difficult to actually draw someones attention to a specific area.

They have even managed to fit in another ad in the content area.

Tracking users in Articulate Online who don't have email access

2007-03-20T17:27:00.000-07:00

A question came up this morning...

Here is the scenario (from large manufacturing company, utility, and hotel chain):

Our users do not have company assigned email addresses or a dedicated
PC. They share a PC in a break room, front desk, or shared kiosk environment. It
is in this type of venue that they take their mandatory e-learning courses and would then subsequently take their quizzes to ensure compliance on company wide matters (diversity training, protection of company assets, corporate ethics policies).
The suggestion has been to use employee id or badge number as the unique log-in. The challenge for us would be how to get the password to the private user if the content is private and email is not provided to distribute that. Also, in a shared environment, there would be problems with cookies for guestbook and perhaps also for would you like to resume where you left off from the course? So, we would need to look at a workaround option for that (Shared computer option so as not to use cookies?).

Question: So given the above environment, how can you track your users in Articulate Online, if they don't have an email address and only use a shared computer?

Answer: What you could do is create your user accounts as if they had email addresses like this:

[userid]@[somemadeupdomain]

The users wouldn't actually get any e-mail here. (It's not a real domain anyways.) They just are using a format that the system requires so it looks like a valid e-mail address.

So if I'm a employee at ACME and my id is: 343219, and Jennifer works with me and her id is: 974311, we would log in as:

343219@acmetraining.com

974311@acmetraining.com

You could create your users by using the bulk upload feature in Articulate Online, which would allow you to specify a password for the user, and wouldn't send any emails to the bogus email addresses. You would just need to get your users that password.

Then, just make any content private that you want to track user progress for. This will avoid any problems that might arise from relying on capturing Guestbook data in a public environment.

You will now be able to track your users progress in Articulate Online even though they don't have an email address.

AICC test suite doesn't work on XP SP2 by default

2007-03-19T17:04:00.000-07:00

I spent about 2 hours this morning trying to install the AICC/CMI test suite to do a test of some AICC based content. It has been over a year since I installed it last, and I was getting completely confused because it wasn't working after I installed it.

The AICC/CMI test suite is a great application to test AICC based content in a simulated AICC environment. It allows you to log all information that is sent from the content to the LMS.

It is extremely difficult to find any information on how to install and get it working, so I wanted to post install instructions here in case it helps anyone else out, and so I have a record of how I installed it when I need to install it again next year.

Detailed AICC/CMI Test Suite Installation Instructions for Windows XP SP2

Follow the instructions on the AICC site for downloading the test suite:
http://www.aicc.org/pages/aicc_ts.htm
Download and install an Apache web server from the following site:
http://httpd.apache.org/

Note: Any version will do. The docs for the AICC test suite specifically mention 1.3.3, but I am running 2.xx and I have not run into issues yet)
Install the AICC test suite downloaded in step number 1
Copy "wrapper.exe" that was installed in the AICC test suite folder
(by default it should be installed to: c:\CMI_TST)
Paste "wrapper.exe" into the cgi-bin folder on the Apache web folder
(by default it should be here: C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\cgi-bin)
Copy the following files from C:\CMI_TST
aicc_launcher.dll
done.html
index.html
ltest0000.aas
ltest.aam
ltest.html
Create a folder named AICC in the webroot folder of the Apache web server
(by default it should be here: C:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\htdocs)
Paste the files from step 6 into the folder created in step 7
Right-click on "My Computer"
Select Manage
Double click 'Services and Applications'
Double click 'Services'
Double click on 'Apache2'
Select the 'Log On' tab
Important: Select 'Allow service to interact with desktop'
Click OK and restart the computer

After I did this I was able to use the AICC test suite. The reason it was failing for me earlier is that I didn't have the option selected to 'Allow service to interact with desktop'.

I'll write a follow-up post to this as soon as I get some time on how to actually use the test suite. Using it is about as simple as installing it (which isn't saying much).

Running Articulate products on a Mac

2007-03-07T07:52:00.000-08:00

I see a request or forum post every once in awhile that asks for support for Apple's Mac platform. One way that you can run Articulate Presenter, Quizmaker, and Engage on a Mac is to use a virtualization product like VMWare's new product Fusion, which allows you to run a Windows Operating system in a virtual machine inside of a Mac. You can then install any Articulate product (or any Windows based product for that matter), on a Mac.

Basically there are two products on the market right now that I know of that support running virtual machines on a Mac.

VMWare's Fusion

I use and love their other product VMWare Workstation
I believe since it is still in Beta it is free to use

Parallels

Have heard great things about the tool from other Articulate users

Also, if you are interested, check out this topic on Yahoo the other day about the two products.

So if you are dying to run Articulate's products on a Mac, check out VMWare's Fusion or Parallels.

It's Easy

2007-03-03T16:48:00.000-08:00

"It's easy" - that is what I said when I first saw the new design of www.articulate.com.

Cool things about the new site design:

Look and feel similar to Articulate Online
It is super "clean" and looks "easy"
New forums look awesome
Stated mission page

Seriously, after looking at the site for the last week, I really can't get over how visually appealing it is.

Congrats to Gabe, and the other members of the team that made the new website happen. The site really does a much better job of reflecting how easy Articulate's tools are to use.

If you are interested in seeing how Articulate's new site compares to the old site check out The Way Back Machine.

ARGH PDF continued...

2007-02-27T21:58:00.000-08:00

Interesting to see that others have taken up the PDF topic as well based on my blog post.

http://www.blogherald.com/2007/02/20/dont-let-pdf-files-freeze-your-browser/

Check out the link for some suggestions on improving the PDF-Browser experience.

Find X/Y coordinates of inserted SWF

2007-02-25T15:28:00.000-08:00

Useful forum post from Articulate MVP doofdaddy on how you can find the X/Y coordinates of an inserted SWF.

http://forums.articulate.com/13283-post1.html

Easily update user profiles in Articulate Online

2007-02-19T20:53:00.000-08:00

Want to update your user's profiles but don't want to update them manually or import an updated CSV? (for info on bulk updating via csv see this kb article)

In Articulate Online if you make content private, and require guestbook information, user profiles will be automatically updated with information entered in the guestbook.

So a quick, easy way to get all your user profiles updated (or filled in) would be to send your users a content link to content that requires a login, and has required guestbook fields.

Mozealous.com gets a face lift

2007-02-17T14:35:00.000-08:00

I have yet again decided to change the design of my blog.

I really wanted to redesign my blog again because there were several things about it I didn't like:

1. It wasn't very readable. I went with a comic book theme which, was dark, ugly, and horribly unreadable, which is a bad idea for a blog.
2. The comic book character I used didn't look anything like me (based on feedback I received)
3. It was ugly

So I decided to redesign the blog again, and changed my picture to a cartoon that looks much more like me. The image I used is an image of what I would look like if I was on South Park.

Well, anyways, I hope you like the new site design, and please let me know if you have any feedback.

P.S. There are still some issues in various browser issues that I am trying to correct.

Arggh I accidentally clicked on a link to a PDF document

2007-02-15T17:08:00.000-08:00

Isn't it annoying when you accidentally click on a link to a PDF document? Then your system stalls for about 20 seconds as it tries to open Acrobat Reader?

I sure hope Adobe doesn't do to the Flash Player what it did to Acrobat Reader.

How bad would it suck if it took as long to open a piece of Flash content as it does to open a piece of PDF content?

Robin Good reviews Articulate Online

2007-02-15T07:54:00.000-08:00

Check out this review of Articulate Online by Robin Good:

Track Online Course Delivery And Student Performance Without A LMS - Articulate Online

Even includes a YouTube remix that is really cool.

Articulate Online uses SSL

2007-02-12T16:52:00.000-08:00

One of the features I am really glad we included in Articulate Online is added security. Articulate Online uses SSL for login pages and for publishing. This will ensure that your login information can not be stolen by a malicious user.

It is a cool feature that I a glad we added. For more info on SSL, and what it means see the following wiki post:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Layer_Security

Shouldn't this be a send button?

2007-02-08T13:49:00.000-08:00

I just upgraded to Office 2007, and I am a little confused as to why the Paste button is here when sending an email in Outlook 2007. Shouldn't the send button be there instead (like it was in Office 2003)?

Don't get me wrong, the new Office is pretty cool, but I just thought this was odd, as I almost never paste into emails, and I always Send emails I begin.

So why not place the Send button in the same location that it was in Office 2003?

Publish to Articulate Online

2007-02-07T11:18:00.000-08:00

If you have ever worked with a Learning Management System before you probably have noticed that uploading content from any eLearning development tool can be an arduous and confusing task. For example, check out the blog posting I did several months ago on uploading content to Moodle. When working with an LMS you will quickly realize what a pain it is to upload content to a Learning Management System.

The typical workflow for uploading content to a Learning Management System is as follows:

Start your authoring tool of choice - Articulate Presenter and Quizmaker recommended :-)
Select the LMS standard that your LMS uses, either AICC, SCORM 1.2, SCORM 2004
Set your tracking options
Publish your content as a zip file
Log into your Learning Management System
Upload your content to your Learning Management System

If you are unfamiliar (or even if you are familiar), publishing to a LMS can be very confusing.

Questions you might ask yourself:

what LMS standard does my LMS use?
what does AICC or SCORM mean?
how do I upload content to my Learning Management System?
why are there so many damn acronyms?

When we designed Articulate Online we definitely saw this as a problem that we didn't want Articulate Online users to experience.

That is why we created a simple one click publishing process for Articulate Online.

At this point I was going to create a presentation that compared how easy it was to publish content to Articulate Online as opposed to Moodle or Breeze, but then I realized how much work that would be, and Alli Starr's presentation documents pretty well how easy it is to publish to Articulate Online.

But, if you want to see an example of how easy it is to publish to Articulate Online compared to Moodle, check out Alli's presentation to see publishing to Articulate Online, and this blog posting for publishing to Moodle.

So if you haven't done so already, sign up for a free trial of Articulate Online to check it out yourself.

Articulate Online's reports

2007-02-06T15:48:00.000-08:00

Since the Articulate Online beta launch (and subsequent release) I have moved some of the presentations (Articulate Video Examples, Custom Color Schemes) that I have previously posted on my website to Articulate Online to take advantage of Articulate Online's reports.

The reports that Articulate Online offers are by far one of the most visually appealing set of reports offered by any LMS or LMS-like system on the market.

Articulate Online also allows you to export any of the reports to PDF, CSV or XML...which is pretty sweet, because I can take the PDF and email it to a colleague, take the CSV or XML and import those results into a database or into another program.

Example exports of the Progress Report for my Custom Color Schemes presentation:

Progress Report PDF

Progress Report XML

Progress Report CSV

As you can see from the reports above, the progress report shows me how far the viewers of my presentation have progressed, and where the average person stops viewing (slide 7) my presentation. This can be useful in determining where my users are losing interest in the presentation.

The Progress Report is just one of the 12 reports that Articulate Online offers. The reports tell you virtually everything you could ever want to know about how your students are viewing your presentations, and taking your quizzes.

So if you haven't checked out Articulate Online yet, you can sign up for a free 30-day trial account at http://www.articulate.com/free.aspx.

Also, if you haven't already seen them, the demos of Articulate Online created by Alli Starr are pretty awesome. You can find them here.

Articulate Online

2007-01-30T17:15:00.000-08:00

Finally...an easily affordable, simple to understand way to track your presentations and quizzes...Articulate Online. Check it out, it is what I (along with many others) have been working on for the last year.

Articulate Online

Release Date 1/30/07.

More on usability of manuals

2007-01-27T13:00:00.001-08:00

This a pretty funny clip that shows how annoying it would be if the Microsoft Clippit Help character tried to help in other manners of life. The best part of the clip is when he tries to help the guy spreading propaganda.

RTFM

2007-01-21T18:36:00.000-08:00

When I worked in product support for eHelp, Macromedia and Adobe, there was a common phrase that you would hear around the product support department.

It was RTFM.

In case you don't know what this stands for, it stands for Read The F***ing Manual.

One thing people who say this never realize is that nobody reads the manual, especially with software manuals. Software manuals are boring, and for most products (Articulate not included), are poorly written.

Good software shouldn't need an extensive manual, and if it does, users won't ever read it, and people will never figure out how to use the software.

Why don't bug tracking systems allow me to submit bugs via email?

2007-01-18T23:33:00.000-08:00

Sorry for the lack of eLearning posts lately.

We are busy getting Articulate Online ready for release and haven't had much time to post on eLearning related subjects....

But anyways, to my point in this blog post, why don't bug tracking systems allow you to submit bugs via email? Don't know if some do, but I know the one we use doesn't, and I wish it did. I get lots of emails on a day to day basis with bug reports from beta testers, and it would be so much nicer if I could just properly format the email and then send it to some address that would take it and automatically enter it into the bugbase.

My blog allows me to submit blog posts via email, and I never have the urge to do that.

Man that would make my life easier.

SCORM and Essay questions

2006-12-26T21:17:00.000-08:00

Do you use a SCORM 1.2 based LMS with Articulate Quizmaker content and wonder why your LMS is truncating the responses to essay questions to only 255 characters?

The issue is actually that the SCORM 1.2 standard only allows questions repsonses to be up to 255 characters.

If you have worked with Learning Management Systems and content authoring tools such as Articulate Presenter, Quizmaker, and Captivate you might have run into issues with your content integrating with the Learning Management System . Often times finger pointing will happen between the Learning Management System and the authoring tool. The LMS company will say it is a problem with the content, then the authoring tool vendor will tell you it is a problem with the LMS, but very seldom do people ever point the finger at the actual standard as the culprit.

The more you find out about the SCORM 1.2 standard the more you begin to realize how inflexible it really is.

Note: The finger pointing I am reffering to is mainly from my experience at Adobe/Macromedia. Finger pointing doesn't happen at Articulate :-)

Another good audio article

2006-12-26T20:34:00.000-08:00

Here is another good audio article written by Ethan Winer:
http://www.ethanwiner.com/audiophoolery.html

It was an article published for Skeptic magazine, and it dispels some popular myths. He also explains in detail some of the common audio lingo such as Noise, Frequency Response, and Distortion.

Good website for debunking common Audio myths

2006-12-25T22:40:00.000-08:00

Found a great website that has some information written by Ethan Winer where he discusses some popular audio myths:

Dispelling Popular Audio Myths

If you are heavy into creating great audio this is a must read. It is highly technical, but very interesting.

Moosejaw emails are a treat

2006-12-05T20:46:00.000-08:00

One of the few weekly emails/newsletters I get from stores that I actually make a point out of reading is Moosejaws's newsletter. Normally newsletters I recieve are filled with the same weekly specials that very rarely are interesting. Well Moosejaw's emails usually mention a sale or promotion going on, but then the owner of the company will add a note to each email telling what he has been up to, and it is usually hilarious. Here is the excerpt from a recent email from moosejaw.

I always take a vacation before we get super crazy during the holidays. Vacations are a rarity and something I look very forward to. I was going to change that sentence and write ..."to which I look very forward" but I didn't think you'd care. So I went on vacation to San Diego with the girlfriend and after fighting about it for seven minutes, I agreed to stay at her sister's apartment. I figured the two sisters would spend the whole time talking and I could just do my thing. Not sure what my thing is but I planned to do a lot of it. Anyway, the whole weekend was a disaster and it couldn't end fast enough. Yes, there was the non-stop rain but that was nothing. The sister had her boyfriend over the entire time! I didn't know she had a boyfriend and if I did know, there's no chance I would have stayed there. The weekend was one giant double date and I was left hanging with the sister's boyfriend. If you saw how
close I had to sit next to him on the tiny couch in the tiny living room, you'd feel my pain. I think we touched two or three times. If I knew him better I would have put a dining room chair between us. I don't have to worry about him reading this email because he's anti-technology. He thinks it makes the world too impersonal. I made a point to check my Blackberry every 10 seconds instead of every fifteen seconds which is more typical. Besides all that, I had a very nice vacation.

Check out the site if you get a chance. http://www.moosejaw.com/.

Desperately seeking Quizmaker projects

2006-11-15T14:04:00.000-08:00

Have a pretty interesting Quizmaker project that really pushes the envelope on Quizmaker features? Well I would like to see it. I am looking to get some sample Quizmaker projects for testing, so if you have any Quizmaker projects you are willing to share with me you can upload them via the following form:

http://www.mozealous.com/dropbox/

Thanks much!

Articulate Guru Contest

2006-11-07T11:43:00.000-08:00

Do you have a pretty sweet e-Learning course that you think is better than anyone elses? Willing to put it on the line to prove it? Articulate has just anounced the $1,500 Articulate Guru awards contest.

Your presentations will be judged on the following criteria:

Effectiveness of course content to transfer knowledge
Use of compelling media (graphics, audio, video, etc.)
Wide use of authoring tool features
Effective combination of Presenter, Quizmaker and Engage

Deadline is March 15, 2007.

Good luck. It will be interesting to see what people submit.

Imported Audio in AP de-mystefied

2006-10-30T23:05:00.000-08:00

I often see posts on our forums from users asking what type of audio (WAV or MP3) they should import into Articulate Presenter, or people asking if it is better to import MP3 audio than WAV because they think that since MP3 files are smaller it will produce smaller output.

So to answer the question, "What audio file type should I use to import into Articulate Presenter?"

Use WAV files when possible when importing into Articulate Presenter.

Here are the facts:

Importing WAV files will produce the same output file size as MP3 files of the same length

If you are importing MP3 files in the hopes that it will produce smaller output file sizes don't bother. The same audio file when imported in WAV format vs MP3 will produce the same output file size.

Imported MP3 files are converted to WAV when importing into Articulate Presenter
The reason we do this is that when using the Timeline Audio Editor the files must be in WAV format in order for us to edit the amount of audio that plays on each slide, so if you import MP3 files into Articulate Presenter we will automatically convert it back to WAV.

Imported MP3's audio quality will be less than imported WAVs
The MP3 audio format is a lossy format, meaning that when you convert WAV to MP3 the output file won't sound as good as the original WAV. Articulate Presenter will convert the WAV file to MP3 when published, but doing this conversion only once from WAV to MP3 will be less lossy, than converting to MP3, then converting to WAV, then converting to MP3. That being said, we always keep your source WAV on disk, so each time you publish it won't affect the quality of your audio file.

Articulate Presenter lets you specify the audio quality settings of the output MP3
If you want to use a specific audio bitrate for one reason or another, Articulate Presenter allows you to specify the audio quality settings for your ouput audio file. To change this go to Articulate>Library and Options>Quality and choose Custom. We allow you to specify any of the Audio Bitrates that Flash supports. By limiting you to only audio bitrates that Flash supports we prevent audio from sounding chipmunky.

Creating Custom Engage Color Schemes

2006-10-23T21:44:00.000-07:00

Ok, now that Articulate Engage has launched and people are getting more familiar with the program, I wanted to start showing some examples of things you can do with Engage that you might not notice right out of the box. Well, one of the cool things you can do is create your own Engage color schemes so that you can customize the colors of your Engage Interactions to match your corporate color scheme.

In the presentation linked below I show you how you can create your own custom color schemes for use in Engage. It is a short presentation (7:07) that should walk you through the basics of creating your own color schemes.

Launch Presentation (7:07)

Also, I have created 3 new custom color schemes that you can download here. The colors are:

Fata Romana
Off 2 Africa
Grunge school

To install the color schemes unzip the 3 attached zip files into the following folder:
C:\Program Files\Articulate\Articulate Engage\schemes

After unzipping the files close and restart Engage and you should see the new schemes.

The color schemes I created were inspired by http://beta.dailycolorscheme.com/ (cool site).

Flash Player Security Warning

2006-10-21T11:39:00.000-07:00

If you have distribuled your Articulate Presenter, Quizmaker or Engage content via a CD you might have run into a Flash Player Security warning about Flash and local content.

For more info on the issue see this technote (http://support.articulate.com/kb/000699.php).

Well a cool program called HTML Executable allows you to repackage your published web content as a single EXE file. The bonus of doing this is that your users won't get prompted about Flash Player security warnings.

I would recommend trying it out though because I haven't fully tested it, but it seemed to work pretty well for me.

Articulate - Nike + 5k

2006-10-16T22:40:00.000-07:00

Ok, this has absolutely nothing to do with Articulate or eLearning, but since my blog readership seems pretty decent I am posting this here in hopes someone will join me. I just bought the Nike + (plus) kit for my iPod Nano and am desperately looking for others to join my Nike+ Articulate 5k Challenge. What is the Nike+ iPod kit you ask? Check out this video below for more info...This is by far my coolest toy, and if you are a runner and have the iPod Nano it is a must have, and doesn't require Nike shoes.

Well to get to the point, the challenge is to see who can run the fastest 5k before the end of the year. If anyone is interested in joining send me an email at dmozealous AT articulate.com. The winner just might get an Articulate Capitan Smiley.

Sorry, I know this isn't eLearning or Articulate related, just hoping I can find others to run against. Will post again on something meaningful later this week, so stay tuned.

Race Info

Date: Fastest run by 12/31/06
Distance: 5k (because I like the metric system)
Who: Anyone who wants to join
Cost: Must own Nike+ Ipod Kit (only 29$ Cheap!)
Prizes: Articulate Capitan Smiley (for winner)
To Join: email dmozealous AT articulate.com

Why won't my FLV's playback when deployed via a server?

2006-10-10T16:45:00.000-07:00

One possible reason is that in IIS in WINDOWS 2003 FLV needs to be configured as a supported MIME type. I continually foget this, so I am posting here for two reasons:

Maybe it will help someone else out
Maybe it will help me remember to do this

To setup IIS to support FLV as a MIME type follow the directions below:

Right click the site in IIS and select Properties
Select the HTTP Headers Tab
Select File Types
Under the MIME Map section and select New Type
Type ".flv" as the associated extension and "video/x-flv" as the content type
Select OK

Your FLVs should now play back when viewed from the server. If you use a hosting company to host your files it is best to check with them about adding FLV as a supported MIME type.

Engage a better way to FLV

2006-10-03T14:43:00.000-07:00

For those of you who haven't heard...Articulate announced it's new product Articulate Engage today. For anyone who has come to my blog looking for advice on how to add Flash Video (FLV) to a slide, Engage now allows you to easily add slide level FLV without a bunch of complicated work arounds or having to know Flash. You can find out more about Engage here.

To see an example of how you can add FLV video to a slide in Articulate Presenter click the presentation image below.

OnTime reconsidered

2006-09-27T18:49:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week I had a blog post on Handling Errors Gracefully that described some of the issues that I was having with OnTime. Well shortly after the blog posting I received a comment on the blog from Hamid Shojaee (founder of Axosoft) who asked for some more indepth feedback on my dislike of OnTime. Last night I sent a rather lengthy email to Hamid outlining some of my concerns about OnTime....and I must say, one thing that really, really impresses me about OnTime is that Hamid took the time to solicit this feedback, and also took the time to personally call me (and my manager) about the issue.

At Articulate we are extremely passionate about our software, and we take great pride in what we do. What Hamid demonstrated to me is that he, and others at OnTime are as passionate about their software as we are about ours (ok, maybe not as passionate, because we are damn passionate, but they are a close second). As I mentioned in my email to Hamid, we chose OnTime for a variety of reasons, and one of those reasons is that they are reliable and that they can provide proper support.

Hamid was also very helpful in doing his best to address our concerns, and suggesting other implementations that might fit our current work environment better.

So, in conclusion, I am really impressed with Hamid taking the time to address the concerns of his customers. We are working on trying out some of the suggestions given, and I will post more info on this topic as I try out the suggestions.

Using Sorenson Squeeze to create flash movies for Articulate Presenter

2006-09-26T19:02:00.000-07:00

If you are looking to add short videos to your slides in Articulate Presenter a great option for converting your videos to SWF format (or FLV for that matter) is Sorenson Squeeze for Flash. It is a great (and relatively inexpensive) tool that can convert almost any common video (mpeg, avi, mov) to SWF format.

Converting your videos to SWF is a great option if you are looking to embed short video clips (less than a minute in length) into an Articulate Presenter slide.

If you already own Sorenson and don't know how to create an Embeded Video watch this demonstration on creating an embedded video in Sorenson. By default when using Sorenson to convert a video to SWF it will actually create SWF player that loads in a linked FLV. The link above will show you how to create an embedded video that actually embeds the video in the SWF.

Benefits of using Embedded Video:

Can easily be controlled by the Articulate Presenter playback controller
Results in only a single output file
Only requires the Flash Player to view

Pitfalls of using Embedded Video:

Can only be used for videos less than a minute in length

Note: Embedded video should only be used with short video clips (less than a minute in length).

For other options for longer video (more than a minute in length) see the following blog postings:
Flash video in a slide
Slide level FLV without Flash

For more info on Sorenson check out the following links:
Converting Non-Flash Movies to SWF
Sorenson Squeeze 4.3 for Flash

For more information on Flash Video in general:
Delivery Options for Flash Video

Great German eLearning Blog

2006-09-25T23:48:00.000-07:00

If anyone speaks German and is looking for a good German blog on eLearning check out the following website:

http://www.rapid-eLearning.ch

They have done a great job of making links to presentations look very engaging (i.e. by posting a thubmnail image of the presentation as a link). Pretty cool site and an excellent resource for any German Articulate Users.

For the English speaking folks you might want to try translating it via babelfish, as it contains some pretty good info.

Handling errors gracefully

2006-09-25T23:26:00.000-07:00

Rant On:
It really bugs me when software programs have no error handling whatsoever. Take for example OnTime. If at any time you loose internet connectivity when trying to use OnTime (a bug tracking system) OnTime throws the unhandled exception shown below.
To me it is shocking that:
A. That they had no error handling for what is likely to be a common error
B. No QA guy or gal ever caught this

Imagine for a moment if every time you tried to publish a presentation from Articulate Presenter without first saving the Powerpoint file we through up this exception, then crashed Powerpoint...How annoying would that be?

Thankfully Articulate Presenter has better error handling than this.

BTW...if anyone from Axosoft reads this, it would be awesome if you fixed this.
Rant off.

Sorry, I felt compelled to write about a program I disliked after my last post about a product I liked. I wanted to maintain some balance :-)

Cool add-on to Skype

2006-09-21T23:26:00.000-07:00

Normally I am against pimping non-Articulate products, but every once in awhile I try out a product that is soo cool, and so hard to find I feel that I must blog about it. For about the last month I have been searching for a tool that will allow me to automatically record Skype phone calls, and after messing around with some pretty sub-par programs (such as powergramo) I finally found one that worked well, and has a pretty slick UI. The program I found is called Pamela and beats anything else out there hands down.

The reason I think this program is soo cool is that it enables me to record Skype calls (I know I mentioned that already) in high quality MP3 format (with some tweaks) and easily post those recordings on the web for podcasting. As many of you know podcasting is becoming the rage in eLearning now, and Pamela is a great tool for creating podcasts from phone conferences with an included RSS feed.

Well anyways, it is a great tool, and a must have for any skype user. Click the link below to check it out!

Flash Player Ubiquity

2006-09-15T00:17:00.000-07:00

Ever wonder what percentage of people have the Flash Player installed? Ever wonder what percentage of people are using which version of the Flash Player? Adobe keeps track of these statistics and has posted the statistics on their website (Adobe Flash Player Version Penetration).

Knowing this can be important when you are trying to create Flash content that the majority of the people can view.

New site design and search

2006-09-06T21:57:00.000-07:00

If you aren't reading this post via a RSS reader you have probably noticed the new site design. I use blogger as my blogging tool and they give you a choice of about 20 different templates to choose from. So I spent the last couple of hours modifying the site to use a new custom layout I designed. I tried to make it have somewhat of a comic book feel without being too unprofessional. I also added a new search feature that is specifically tailored for this site. Hopefully this will enable people to find old posts a little easier. If you have a feelings about the new site design please feel free to leave me comments, I will be interested to hear some feedback.

Is offering 31 flavors bad for business?

2006-09-01T14:51:00.000-07:00

I just listened to a really great podcast by Jared Spool and Barry Schwartz at UIE on Podcast: Designing for the Paradox of Choice.

We have all been in the scenario before where you go to a restaurant where the waiter or waitress comes up and asks to take your order. So you tell the waitperson that you would like a steak. You are then asked, "How would you like that cooked?" to which you reply, with your choice of cooked temperature. Then you are questioned, "Would you like soup or salad?" then "what type of salad" then "what kind of dressing?" then "would you like a potato with that?" then "mashed or baked," "with sour cream or without?" By the end of the whole process you are about ready to choke the waiter because all you want is your damn steak and who knew ordering a steak would be soo damn difficult?

Well in the podcast they discuss how we are much better off now because we can get exactly what we want because we have soo many choices, but the process of getting what you is soo difficult you are often left less satisfied with the eventual outcome. Much of what they talk about is based on a study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (JPSP, Vol. 79, No. 6) that showed that, "when shoppers are given the option of choosing among smaller and larger assortments of jam, they show more interest in the larger assortment. But when it comes time to pick just one, they're 10 times more likely to make a purchase if they choose among six rather than among 24 flavors of jam. " Hence the question I posed in the title of this post, "Is offering 31 Flavors bad for business?"

The reason I found this so fascinating and so relevant is that I am a Quality Assurance Engineer, who often has to either design parts of the user interface for our new products, or critique parts of others designs and we are often presented with this problem. The problem is trying to allow a product to be flexible to meet everyone's needs without making the process of getting there completely frustrating to the majority of users. We have a general rule that we go by when we are designing new parts of our application, you want to make the default choice for users the option that 75-80% of your users is going to choose. This might seem simple and obvious, but you have to ask yourself this question multiple times a day when you are looking at software design. By designing to make life as easy as possible for the 75-80% of the users we hope to make the software we hope to keep them from having to make endless choices when using our tools. This however doesn't mean that our software is not flexible, its just that we try to keep some of the more obscure choices that you need to make outside of the main workflow (in areas like the options menu). We even offer an Articulate Presenter SDK for those who don't just want the 31 choices of ice cream but want the possibility of having a 140 different flavors of ice cream that the ice cream makers had probably never dreamed of. So by moving the endless choices out of the main workflow of a product we are able (hopefully) to satisfy the simplicity needs of the many while still offering options to satisfy the other 20-25%.

Slide level FLV without Flash 2.0

2006-08-30T22:11:00.000-07:00

Hello again!

Sorry for the delay in posting...I have had a serious case of bloggers block and wasn't able to think of anything to blog about. Well, I was reading a post on the forums today and something someone posted gave me some ideas how I could improve upon the post I made a couple of months ago about adding Slide Level FLV in Articulate Presenter without the use of Flash (Want slide level FLV but don't have Flash). So I went ahead and made some changes to the files to add some additional functionality based on feedback I have recieved from the previous posting. The new version of these files I am posting allows you to do several things:

Add an FLV video to a slide in Articulate Presenter without using or knowing Flash
Allows the playback controller on the Articulate Presenter player to pause the FLV
Allows the volume controller on the Articulate Presenter player to control the audio of the FLV

I was able to make these changes and by using the Articulate Presenter SDK. If you have not heard of the SDK, and want to find out more, check out the blog post on the Articulate Presenter SDK.

Instructions for use

Download slidevideo20.zip (35 KB)
Open up PowerPoint
Select slide where you want the FLV video
Select Articulate>Insert Flash Movie
Select 'Display in slide'
Click Next
Select Browse
Browse to and select 'slidevideo_wpause_sound.swf'
Select Next
Select 'Play Flash movie and slide in sync'
Select 'Move to next slide when user clicks next'
Click Next
Click Finish
Select Articulate>Publish and publish your presentation
Navigate to the dirctory that you published to
In the root level of your output foler (root level will also contain the player.html file) copy the flv.xml file contained in this zip
Open up the FLV.xml in any text editor such as notepad
Change the source file to match the name of your FLV file
Change the x-location to the position you want the FLV to appear on the X axis. The upper left hand corner of the slide is considered to be an x-position of 0. The farthest right x-position is 720.
Change the y-location to the position you want the FLV to appear on the y axis. The upper left hand corner is a y-position of 0. The farthest botttom y-position is 540.
Save the file so the name matches the slide number name (i.e. if the video is on slide 1 it would be 1.xml)
Copy your FLV into the 'player' folder in the output folder
View the output

Your presentation should now launch and your FLV will play in the slide.

Limitations

Only works in Flash Player 8 or later
Slide must be set to 'Play Flash movie after slide has begun'

Additional Questions?

My email address is posted in the readme file in the download. Please let me know if you have any questions.

If you would like access to the source of the SWF that I have used I can send you the source as long as you are a member of the Articulate Platinum Membership plan. Sorry, can't send it out to everyone as it exposes a bit of the Articulate API.

Tracking Captivate Quizzes and Assessments in Articulate Presenter in AICC LMS

2006-07-26T08:48:00.000-07:00

So a couple of people have asked me lately if it is possible to track Captivate Quizzes and Assessments that have been inserted into Articulate Presenter in their LMS.

Well it is possible, you just have to insert the Captivate Quiz or Assessment in Articulate as a web object instead of inserting the Captivate file as a Flash Movie.

Open up the assessment/quiz in Captivate
Turn on LMS tracking (either SCORM or AICC)
Publish from Captivate
This will create an output folder with 3 files, one is exit.swf, one is your projectname.html, and one is projectname.swf.
Rename the html file to index.html
Open up PPT
Select Articulate>Insert Web Object
Select Next
Click Browse and browse to and select your folder you published to in step 3/4
Click Next>Finish
Select Articulate>Publish>Web (note Web not LMS)
Upload your output to your LMS

This is cool because it allows you to track your existing Captivate content in Articulate Presenter, something which even Breeze Presenter can't do.

Notes: Doing this bypasses the use of Articulate Presenters LMS integration code, and relies entirely upon using Captivate LMS integration code. Also, I have only tested this with AICC communication, and I am not sure if it will work with SCORM.

The reason it might not work with SCORM is that in some instances there is a timeout value on when communication has to begin with the LMS after the content is launched. In this scenario if you have the Captivate assessment late in a presentation communication won't begin until you reach that slide, which could be several minutes, which would cause the LMSInitialize to time out.

Advanced Topic: Live Presenter Video in Articulate Presenter?

2006-07-06T17:30:00.000-07:00

As most of you know who read my blog on a regular basis I am a big fan of using Video in my presentations. Probably about 1/3 to 1/2 of my blog postings are done on the subject of incorporating video. Well recently after talking to a customer of Articulate (Steve), I began working on creating an example of incorporating LIVE Presenter Video in Articulate Presenter. Well I finally got around to actually creating a working version of this, and I wanted to explain what I have done, and show some screen shots of my LIVE Presenter Video in action.

I warn you, this example might be a little complex, but I will try to be as clear as possible. And if you have any questions on this, please don't hesitate to contact me on the subject.

Requirements for adding LIVE Presenter Video in Articulate Presenter:

Articulate Presenter
Flash (the application)
Flash Media Server or Flash Communication Server or Flash Streaming Service (such as Vital Stream)
A Web Cam
A Microphone

Why this is cool:

Adding LIVE Presenter Video in Articulate Presenter definitely produces a WOW factor. How cool is it that I can add LIVE Video and stream it to my learners. This will allow presenters to present LIVE presentations to users without expensive, bloated, bandwidth killing, enterprise applications (the app I am referring to rhymes with sneeze).

What does it look like:

Here is a screenshot of what Articulate Presenter looks like when I have streamed in LIVE video into the presenter panel.

As you can see I am waving my hand to the camera.

What you can't see is that the presentation is also streaming audio from my microphone to the presentation as well, so I didn't have to record audio.

How I accomplished this:

I was able to accomplish this by creating two SWF's. One was inserted into Articulate Presenter as Presenter video (play.swf), the other was run on the machine that I wanted to stream the video from (publish.swf). The publish.swf would open up a connection to the Flash Media Server, then the play.swf, when inserted in Articulate Presenter would stream the video back down.

Step by Step Instructions

Create the SWFs:

Download the source files for the play.swf and publish.swf here.
Create a folder in the applications folder of your Flash Communication Server's applications directory called "videos" (Should be C:\Program Files\Macromedia\Flash Communication Server MX\applications by default)
In the "videos" folder copy the main.asc file downloaded in the zip file in step 1
Create a "streams" folder in this folder as well
Open up the play.fla in Flash
In the Actions Frame change the my_nc.connect("rtmp:/videos/") string to point to the videos application on your rtmp server.
Save and publish this file
Open up the play.fla in Flash
In the Actions Frame change the my_nc.connect("rtmp://66.74.217.93/videos/") string to point to the videos application on your rtmp server.
Save and publish this file
Close out of Flash

Verify it works:

You should now test your two SWF's to ensure they are setup properly. Launch the publish.swf, it should be blank by default, then launch the play.swf. If everything is set up properly, you should now be able to see what is being published in the publish.swf in the play.swf file. It should look something like what is on the right. If this is not working, then most likely the paths that you have setup in the FLA to point to your Flash Media Server are incorrect.

Add the SWF to Articulate Presenter:

Now that you have verified that it works it is time to add the play.swf to Articulate Presenter.

Open up PPT
Go to Articulate>Insert Flash Movie>Display in presenter panel
Browse to and select the SWF
Deselect the option to Move to next slide automatically when movie finishes
Click Next
Click Finish
Repeat for any slide that you want to contain live presenter video

Distribute your presentation:

Before distributing your presentation test your project and make sure that it works successfully. After verifying that it works you are ready to distribute it:

Upload your presentation to website or intranet
Send the link to the presentation to anyone you want to view the presentation with instructions on when the presentation will begin
When the presentation begins click on the publish.swf

This will then begin the broadcast of your presentation.

I hope this helps everyone out. Let me know if you have any questions on this.

Want slide level FLV but don't have Flash?

2006-06-14T23:54:00.000-07:00

Check out this new post on this topic! (8/31/06)

So back in March I created a blog posting about using FLV video at the slide level and have been getting a lot of positive feedback on the topic and I am beginning to see more and more people incorporate video into their Articulate presentations (Flash Video in a Slide).

Well the example is great and all, but the it doesn't help anyone who does not have access to the Flash authoring environment. So I have been trying to think of ways to allow users to take advantage of using FLV video at the slide level without having to go purchase Flash, or learn the Flash authoring environment, because after all, who really wants to, or has time to learn Flash, right?

Well here is what I have done. I have created a SWF that can be inserted into Articulate Presenter that will read in an XML file that will tell the SWF which FLV to play, and where to position the FLV on the slide. This is great because it allows anyone to take advantage of using Flash video at the slide level without having to use, or know Flash.

Quick Instructions for use (the zip file contains more detailed instructions via a readme.txt):

Download and unzip the zip file from:
http://www.mozealous.com/downloads/dwmslidevideo.zip (830 kb)
Insert the slidevideo.swf in Articulate using Articulate>Insert Flash Movie menu item
Set the Flash Movie to 'Play Flash movie after slide has begun' when prompted
Publish your project
Navigate to the directory you published to
Copy the flv.xml file contained in the zip file downloaded in step 1 into the output directory
Open the flv.xml file in notepad
Change the video.flv file to the name of your FLV
Change the x-location tag to the location that you would like your FLV to appear on the x-axis
Change the y-location tag to the location that you would like your FLV to appear on the y-axis (note: upper left hand corner is x-location=0 y-location=0)
Copy your FLV into the player folder
Launch the player.html file

Your presentation should now launch and your FLV will play in the slide, and you didn't even need to touch flash to do so!

Limitations

Although this example works well, there are some things that currently just don't work in this example. Below is a partial list of known issues/limitations.

Articulate Player playack controls don't control FLV
Only works in Flash Player 7 or later
Slide must be set 'Play Flash movie after slide has begun'
Doesn't support On2 VP 6 codec since that is only supported in Flash Player 8

Additional Questions?

If you have any addtional question on this example please feel free to either leave a comment on the blog, or email me via the email address provided in the zip file. But please read all instructions carefully.

Hope this helps everyone out!

Optimal Dimensions for FLV Video?

2006-06-01T19:51:00.000-07:00

Someone asked me today what the Optimal Dimensions were for an FLV video used in the presenter panel of Articulate Presenter. I thought I would post it here, in case anyone else wanted to know. Technically, there isn't really an optimal dimension for an FLV video since Articulate Presenter will scale anything that is too large to fit in the presenter panel...but if you wanted to know at which size it would start to scale, that size is 233 pixels wide. So anything that is larger than 233 pixels wide will be scaled down to 233 pixels, and the aspect ratio will be maintained.

Repackaging Articulate content to allow multiple SCO's?

2006-05-25T19:07:00.000-07:00

Every so often I see a forum post, or get an email where someone asks if Articulate supports multiple SCOs or can you repackage your Articulate content with other course content into a single SCORM-Compliant package. So, what is a SCO you ask?

Well, I lifted this from the ADL's website, that explains what it is.

The Content Model defines a powerful model for breaking content into arbitrarily sized units of reuse. These units are called Sharable Content Objects (SCOs) and Assets. An Asset is simply an "electronic representation of media, text, images, sound, Web pages, assessment objects or other pieces of data." Examples of Assets include images, sound clips, Flash movies, etc. A SCO is a collection of one or more assets that represents a logical unit of learning.

For more info on the SCORM communication process check out this site, it is a great resource for anyone looking for an Overview of SCORM communication.

So now that you know what a SCO is, you are probably asking, "well, why would I want to repackage to support multiple SCOs?"

The reason you might want to repackage your content is that maybe you want one single package that has both a Articulate Presenter presentation, and a Articulate Quizmaker quiz. Used independently, you could see that each one could be considered a different logical unit of learning. This can be useful becuase it allows you to reuse existing content, then just repackage several individual units of learning, and have it all in one nice little package.

Make sense? Probably not, but if you got here, and you are reading this, you probably already know why you would want to do this. So your next question is ok, I know what it is, and I know why I want it, now how do I repackage my individual SCOs into a single package. The answer is to use the Manifest Maker to repackage your content. So how do you use Manifest Maker? Well, I have included directions below from a recent forum posting I did.

In order to create multiple SCOs you will have to create multiple assests (for example a Articulate Presentation, and a Quizmaker Quiz) and create a new package using "Manifest Maker" to point to the launch files of each project.

Note: These directions will only work for SCORM 1.2 content and require the use of Macromedia's Dreamweaver.

Install "Manifest Maker"

First you will need to download and install the "Manifest Maker" for Dreamweaver:

Go to the Dreamweaver Exchange
Under 'Categories' select 'Learning'
Find 'Manifest Maker'
Follow the prompts for installing the 'Manifest Maker'

Note: For more information on the 'Manifest Maker' see the following website:
http://www.e-learningconsulting.com/products/manifest-maker.html

Publish Content

Now that you have installed "Manifest Maker" you must create your individual SCOs. For example, you can publish a Quizmaker Quiz, and a Articulate Presenter Presentation as each of your individual SCOs.

Create an output folder for both published projects
Create two subfolders in the output folder (one for each project)
Publish the projects to the respective directories with SCORM output enabled

Repackage

Now that you have created your individual SCO's you will have to repackage them using the "Manifest Maker" inside of Dreamweaver.

Add your published Quizmaker projects to your Dreamweaver site
Open up Dreamweaver
Select 'Commands'
Select 'Manifest Maker 1.2...'
Set the appropriate fields on the 'Metadata' tab
Select 'SCOs'
Select each of the published HTML files and click 'Add SCO'
Click OKThis will generate the necessary files for you to repackage your content so you will have a package with multiple SCOs.

This will generate the necessary files for you to repackage your content so you will have a package with multiple SCOs.

Final Thoughts
I know this is a pretty advanced topic, and it might be very confusing, if you do not understand this topic, and you want more info, please don't hesitate to contact me via the comment links below.

Also, Articulate Presenter and Quizmaker can work in tandem without having to repackage the content, the only reason why you should use the Manifest Maker is if you want to keep your individual assets separated, but be able to repackage them and support multiple SCOs.

Finally, if you think this post looks eerily similar to technote on another website...well, it is, and I wrote that too :-)

Have a great Memorial Day!

Mozealous.com now with Skype!

2006-05-12T20:04:00.000-07:00

You may or may not have noticed, but I have added my Skype status to the side navigation pannel on the right side of this website. If you haven't heard of Skype before, Skype is somewhat of a voicebased instant message client.

If you have used an instant messaging client before, like AOL Instant Messenger or MSN Messenger it is very similar. It allows you to communicate with any of your “buddies” via your broadband line. All it requires is a microphone (headset USB mic is best).

Reasons why skype is awesome:

Clarity is much better than phone service, it sounds like you are in the room with the person
It is free, so long distance rates don’t apply
It is as easy as using AOL Instant Messenger, and requires less work then using the phone (which is amazing, because using the phone is pretty damn easy).

Give it a try, and give me a hollar...if I am availible I will do my best to respond.

Articulate Presenter SDK

2006-04-25T19:43:00.000-07:00

Hello Again,

Lately I have been playing a lot with the Articulate Presenter SDK in an effort to help customers with various issues related to customizing the Articulate Presenter player. Part of the reason I think it is soo cool is that out of all the Articulate Presenter knock offs out there none of them have a Player SDK like Articulate Presenter does (they also lack many other features as well). With the use of Flash the Articulate Presenter SDK allows me to do the following:

Add functionality by developing custom player tabs.
Add player features by creating custom player toolbar items.
Customize certain player assets.
Communicate with the player via runtime API methods.

The reason that this is a must have for users trying to extend the customization of Articulate Presenter is that the SDK is very powerful, and allows you to do things that the standalone player will not do.

For example, I can create a custom SWF that I insert in each slide that will allow me to control the volume on a slide-by-slide basis.

I can also create a custom SWF that dynamically changes colors based on the colors of the player, which is cool if I am reusing a SWF in various different projects.

In an example that I created today I created a SWF that loaded in a FLV into a slide, then used the Player SDK to automatically advance to the next slide when the FLV video finished playing. Which is impossible to do in programs such as Breeze (or if it is possible in Breeze, it is very difficult to figure out how to do).

Articulate Presenter SDK (2:03 minutes)

So, if you are interested you should certainly at least check it out. For more information visit http://blog.articulate.com/wom/2005/07/18/articulate_sdk/

The Articulate Presenter SDK comes with the Articulate Platinum Membership plan.

Stop the Presses!

2006-04-18T21:52:00.000-07:00

In case you haven't heard the news I just wanted to draw your attention to todays press release that just came accross Yahoo. Articulate is pleased to announce that Arlyn Asch has been appointed as the Chief Technology Officer.

From the article:

Asch has more than a decade of experience in developing ground-breaking e-learning software. Prior to joining Articulate in November 2005, Asch was director of engineering for Macromedia, where he led Captivate product strategy, as well as that product’s development team. He also held senior management and engineering roles at eHelp, leading development of the RoboDemo, RoboHelp, and RoboPresenter products. Asch is named as inventor on five patents related to e-learning technology.

For more information on the subject please read the article on Yahoo titled Articulate Appoints Arlyn Asch as Chief Technology Officer.

This is really, really great news for anyone who has any interest in Articulate products as Arlyn brings so much experience to the table.

Congrats Arlyn!

Using Captivate content in Articulate Presenter

2006-04-14T16:03:00.000-07:00

I have seen a couple of posts on the forums lately concerning Captivate content inside of Articulate Presenter. So I wanted to go over some tips and tricks for optimizing the Captivate content to make the content integration successful. Following the steps in this article will ensure that the content integration is successful.

Recording Size
When creating a Captivate demonstration make sure that your recording area is no larger than 720x540. Articulate Presenter only supports inserted Flash Movies up to 720x540 in size. You can use the preset Breeze recording size in Captivate which will size your recording dimensions to the optimal size for Articulate Presenter.

Note: When inserting a Flash Movie in Articulate Presenter from Captivate sized at 720x540, you might get a warning that the dimensions of the Flash movie is 721x541. You can ignore this warning.

Movie Preferences
Make sure that you use the default loading screen in Captivate to make sure that your content will play back without any issues. You can set the loading screen option under Movie>Preferences inside of Captivate.

Remove the Playback Control
If you are going to insert your Captivate demonstration inside of Articulate Presenter there is no reason to use the Captivate Playback controller since you can set the Flash Movie to 'Play Flash movie and slide in sync'. You can remove the playback controller in Captivate by selecting Movie>Preferences>Playback Control and selecting None for the position. To set Articulate Presenter to play the Flash Movie in sync follow the directions below:

Select Articulate>Insert Flash Movie
Select Display in slide
Click Next
Select the Flash Movie
Click Next
Under Synchronization select 'Play Flash Movie and slide in sync'
or
Select 'Play Flash movie after slide has begun'
Select 'Allow Player to control inserted Flash movie'

Note: You also have an option in Articulate Presenter to Display Flash Movie in new browser window, and in this instance you might want to keep the playback controller. Using this option will also allow you to make your recordings larger than 720x540.

Audio
If you choose to include audio with your Captivate demonstration, and you want it to be synchronized with your Captivate demonstration make sure that the recording is either done in Captivate, or recorded and then imported to Captivate. This will keep your audio synchronized when viewed in Articulate Presenter.

Captions
I would also recommend making sure that you use a caption style and fonts inside of Captivate that match your Articulate Presenter template and presentation. This will help ensure that the content looks and feels professional.

Frames Per Second
Don't change the Frames Per Second rate of either your Captivate demonstration, or Articulate Presenter. This can cause issues during playback, and there really aren't any advantages to lowering the FPS, or raising it.

Flash movies in Articulate Presenter

2006-04-03T21:35:00.000-07:00

Hello again!

A little while ago I was asked by a couple of people if I could show some examples of effectively using Flash movies inside of Articulate Presenter. Well, I finally created an example, that is somewhat of a work-in-progress at this point.

The following example gives you an example of video inside of Articulate Presenter.

Articulate Video Examples (9:46 minutes)

The example contains examples of the following:

Software demonstration in a slide
Use of Presenter video
Use of Presenter video and slide video for the same slide
FLV Video in a slide
A Web Object in a slide

I say that it is a work in progress because I will be making some changes to it soon, such as adding audio, and making the presentation a little shorter in duration.

If you can think of any other examples that you would like to see please feel free to comment and I will do my best to accomidate:-)

Streaming Flash Video in a Slide

2006-03-25T07:56:00.000-08:00

Hello Again!

When I began to write up and research my blog posting titled 'Flash video in a slide' I decided to only create directions and an example of adding Progressive Download Flash Video (FLV) into an Articulate Presenter presentation. I had some thought about also adding an example of how to use Streaming Flash Video from a Flash Communication Server (now known as Flash Media Server) inside a slide, but I guess I figured that not enough people were looking for an example of Streaming Flash Video inside of Articulate Presenter to warrant an example. Well, less than 2 days after posting the original article I was contacted by 2 people asking if it was possible to add Streaming Flash Video in a slide. Well, it is, and in this blog posting I will explain how to add Streaming Flash Video from a Flash Communication Server into an Articulate Presenter slide.

In this blog posting I won't get into the specifics of the advantages of using Streaming Video over Progressive download video because it is covered pretty heavily in the Delivery Options for Flash Video developer center on the Macromedia/Adobe website.

What is needed to add Streaming Flash Video into an Articulate Presenter Slide?

Articulate Presenter
Access to a Flash Communication Server, or Streaming Media Service such as VitalStream
Flash MX 2004 or later
A basic understanding of Flash
access to my FLV2apstream.FLA file (click to download)

Like my previous example of adding Progressive Download FLV into Articulate Presenter at the slide level, you will need to create a SWF shell to playback the FLV, which can then be imported into Articulate Presenter for playback. Currently Articulate Presenter only supports direct FLV import into the presenter panel, so in order to get this to work you must first create a SWF shell, that will act as the player for the SWF at the slide level.

To create a SWF that loads an FLV from a streaming server:

Download FLV2apStream.zip
Unzip the file
Open it in Flash MX 2004 or later
Select the Actions panel
On line 2 of the ActionScript you will see a line that looks like this:
nc.connect("rtmp://serverurl/project/_definst_");
Change the 'rtmp://serverurl/project/_definst_' to the location of your FLV on your Flash Media Server .
On line 7 of the ActionScript you will see a line that looks like this:
ns.play("shining");
Change the 'shining' value to the instance name of your FLV (it will be the name of your FLV without the FLV extension)
Save the File
Preview

Watch a demo of these steps here.

If you have set this up properly the FLV should now stream into your SWF and should look something like this Streaming Flash Video. For more information on how to do this in Flash check the help file for Flash Communication Server and search for NetStream.play().

To insert the SWF into Articulate Presenter for streaming video in a slide:

Open up PowerPoint
Select Articulate>Insert Flash Movie
Select 'Display in slide'
Click Next
Browse to and select the SWF created earlier
Select 'Move to next slide when user clicks next'
Change the Buffer time to 0
Click Next
Click Finish
Publish your presentation

If everything has been set up properly your FLV should now stream into your Articulate Presenter slide and should look like this Streaming Video Example.

Stay tuned to the blog, eventually this will be a 3 part series on Flash Video. The next installment will be on Streaming LIVE Flash Video into an Articulate Presentation.

Articulate Quizmaker and Presenter with Moodle?

2006-03-19T13:53:00.000-08:00

It seems like lately a lot of people have been asking if Articulate Presenter and Articulate Quizmaker work with Moodle. For those of you that don't know Moodle is a course management system (CMS) - a free, Open Source software package designed using sound pedagogical principles, to help educators create effective online learning communities (that definition came from moodle.org, I have no idea what pedagogical means). For more information on Moodle please visit http://www.moodle.org.

The good news is that Moodle has a SCORM module which allows you to upload any standard SCORM package, which includes Articulate Presenter and Quizmaker content, to include in your course. Both Articulate Presenter and Articulate Quizmaker are certified as SCORM compliant by an independent ADL certification expert which means without having to do anything special Articulate Presenter and Quizmaker will work and report results to Moodle.

The reason this question has come up so often is that Moodle, like many Learning Management Systems, is very complicated and difficult to learn. In the brief video below I have included a demonstration on how to integrate Articulate Presenter content (with an embedded Quizmaker quiz) into Moodle.

As you can see in the demonstration Articulate Presenter and Articulate Quizmaker can work with and report results to Moodle.

Note: Moolde can be a very complicated system to install, like many other Open Source applications, if you are not an advanced computer user. I would recommend getting the help of an advanced user before attempting to install and user Moodle.

For more information on this subject please visit the following sites:
Articulate Presenter SCORM certification information.
Articulate
Moodle
Moodle and SCORM

Flash video in a slide

2006-03-14T20:19:00.000-08:00

As Flash Video (FLV) is becoming a more widely adopted delivery option for video on the web more and more eLearning content creators are looking to add video to their eLearning content.

In Articulate Presenter you have several different options for delivering video:

Display in slide (supports SWF)
Display in presenter panel (supports FLV and SWF)
Display in new browser window (supports SWF)

Since SWF is currently the only option availible at the slide level, many users are trying to embed large videos inside of SWF content for delivery in Articulate Presenter at the slide level.

The problem with this option is that embedded video in SWF format is not a good medium for delivering videos over 90 seconds in length. When you begin to exceed 90 seconds in length for embedded video you will run into audio synchronization issues, and video skipping issues. (For more information on this subject see Delivery Options for Flash Video.

For this reason it has becoming increasingly important to look to alternatives to embedding Video in SWF content. My recommendation for including longer videos at the slide level is to create a SWF file that loads in a Flash Video. This will give you the option of minimizing project file size, but adding the richness of video content. You will then be able to import your SWF which will then load the FLV during presentation playback..

Note: In order to create a SWF that loads a Flash Video File (FLV) you will need to have access to either Flash MX 2004 or Flash 8.

Once you have Flash MX 2004 or later installed, you can edit the FLA file that I created to point to your FLV.

Download the following ZIP file that contains the source FLA:
http://www.mozealous.com/downloads/flv2ap.zip
Open up the source FLA in Flash
Select the Actions layer
Change all the FLV links to links to your FLV
Publish for Flash Player 6
Open your Articulate Presentation
Select > Articulate > Insert Flash Movie...
Select Next
Select Display in slide
Select the published SWF
For Synchronization select 'Play Flash movie after slide has begun'
Deselect option to 'Allow player to control inserted Flash movie'
Select Next
Select Finish
Publish your presentation

You can then customize the SWF to meet your needs for dimension and background color.

Welcome to Dave's Blog

2006-03-14T17:24:00.000-08:00

Hello and welcome to my blog. My name is Dave Mozealous and I am the Quality Assurance Engineer for Articulate. Some of you might remember me from my past position as Quality Assurance Lead for Macromedia for another eLearning content development application (Captivate) and as a Product Support Engineer for various Macromedia products as well.

My goal for this blog is to share some information that I have learned, discovered, or stumbled into over the years while working with various eLearning products. I will try to use this blog to post information that would usually be considered "outside the scope" of normal uses of the program.

I have a heavy background in Learning Management System integration so I will also be posting topics on interesting eLearning information as it comes along.
Please feel free to comment on anything that I post on this site as I welcome all types of feedback.