As has been bouncing around the news, or at least relevant social headlines, the past few months – Adobe’s Flash product has undergone a significant makeover. Long doomed by many, considered ‘too proprietary’ or old or irrelevant in the current HTML5-is-our-saviour era…Adobe has taken steps to keep it alive. Welcome Adobe Animate CC.
Too little, too late? Is it enough to overcome the flash-bashing trend (deserved or not)?
Responsive HTML5 output and Right-to-Left (RtL) language support! Two significant updates to the latest release of Adobe’s Technical Communication Suite. Targeted as a “publishing toolkit for technical writers, help and policy authors, and instructional designers”, Adobe’s TCS includes:
While those versions of Captivate and Presenter have been out for a while, the updates to Framemaker and RoboHelp allow the entire TCS to finally hit a new release (release notes). Continue reading Adobe TechCommSuite 2015 release
There are a few articles out there each year predicting what the hot topics will be (for a variety of things) in the New Year…so we’ll jump on that bandwagon.
SCORM, xAPI, LTI, CMI-5
SCORM will continue to be popular, it’s still far too entrenched. xAPI (TinCan) will grow as more vendors integrate the technology into their products and the general understanding grows. LTI *should* continue to grow, especially since academics tend to move slowly, but I’m not sure how much momentum it has. CMI-5 will be an interesting to watch with the move to ADL. I don’t see that moving forward much in the next year (but I’ve not explored their roadmap). One potential issue I’m surprised not to see more concern about is privacy in relation to xAPI. Anything can be tracked? Anytime? Do the users KNOW that? Remember the furor over cookies, which are not even centralized…
Authoring
Captivate and Storyline will continue to dominate. Watch for Lectora to push harder to re-assert their product. Lesser-known tools like iSpring, Brainshark, Claro, SmartBuilder, and even ZebraZapps will grow as more folks look for tools to enable self-production. With Microsoft Mix, PowerPoint may enjoy even more growth as an eLearning dev tool. Camtasia should retain a solid position as well. Those tools that can really improve upon Responsive Design delivery and significant cross-platform compatibility will have a strong advantage.
Reference sites like eLearning Brothers and online tools like PowToon will also grow and see more demand. Continue reading eLearning Tech and Trends for 2015
Captivate on Google Chrome
There have been many reports of user having playback issues with their HTML5 output from Captivate (i.e. sound and/or video not playing back properly). While those investigations are ongoing, one issue specific to Google Chrome (v.36) has been addressed by Adobe.
Per the Adobe Blog, there are two primary issues:
With Flash being increasingly dismissed for many web projects, Adobe needed an answer to replace at least some of that functionality with a tool that used HTML/JS…resulting in the Edge suite of tools.
Here’s Wikipedia’s entry on the Edge tools. I’m not sure the overview paragraph is terribly accurate, but it’s a good reference page overall, outside Adobe’s site.
That said, Flash isn’t entirely out of the game. With CreateJS integrated, Flash can output to HTML5 Canvas, creating solid images, charts, and animations. I consider this the beginning of the Flash IDE transformation. Until it moves further, however, the Edge tools provide a lot of the otherwise missing HTML functionality.
When you publish an Adobe Captivate project to both SWF and HTML5, three HTML pages are written to the output folder.
Captivate uses the project title as the filenames for the SWF-version of the published files. Say your project name is “MyProject”… In this case:
The multiscreen.html file involves some trickery which evaluates the browser and/or system that is accessing the project, then displays what it believes to be the appropriate version (SWF or HTML5) for the device. If you publish bo
th versions to a SCORM .zip package, the ‘imsmanifest.xml’ file within that package specifies the ‘multisceeen.html’ as the primary launch file; so when the user launches the lesson from the LMS, the ‘multiscreen’ file launches first, the trickery is invoked, and the proper version is presented.
If you always want the HTML5 version to appear, you can edit that manifest file and change this line:
<resource identifier=”SCO_ID1_RES” type=”webcontent” href=”multiscreen.html” adlcp:scormtype=”sco”>
to be:
<resource identifier=”SCO_ID1_RES” type=”webcontent” href=”index_SCORM.html” adlcp:scormtype=”sco”>
However (!), be aware that not all desktop browsers work well with Captivate’s HTML5 output, so be warned this may cause issues for non-mobile users.
When I’m developing Captivate content to be delivered to both desktop and mobile devices, I rely on the manifest and multiscreen files to do their job. When testing published output, I upload the unzipped files to my staging server…and when doing quick tests, I directly load the index_SCORM.html (or just index.html) file using Chrome to do a quick evaluation of how well the mobile output will perform.
Of course, once further along, testing is done on a variety of devices for true evaluation…
So in sum, to quickly check Captivate’s HTML output on your desktop, call the ‘index’ files directly.