Converting 09 to 13
Feb 26, 2014
By
Paul Colby
The Pause button and slider are not working for slides with an AS3 swf. We have taken a one slide PowerPoint file and added a simple AS3 swf which is simply a ball moving from left to right. The pause button simply does not work. The slider simply begins the ball animation over again (in other words, the swf goes back to the first frame). Our test file is as basic as it gets, we can't break it down any further.
To see the sample file, visit http://www.colbyinteractive.com/as3test . Then try using the pause button or the slider.
I've also attached a zip file of the published course and the AS3 Flash file.
Has anyone encountered this problem and if so, has anyone found a fix? Any ideas?
Thanks.
12 Replies
Hi Paul!
Thanks for providing all of that information.
If your SWF file is a movie that requires no interaction from learners, insert it as a video. This synchronizes it with the slide's timeline.
You can read more about that here.
Thank you Leslie, but that won't work for us. The sample I posted was simply to demonstrate the problem. In practice, all of our swfs usually have an introduction that is synced to audio and then some type of interactivity. In other words, we need BOTH the timeline syncing and the ability to have interactivity. This works like a charm in Articulate 09, but that functionality seems to have been lost in Articulate 13 (apparently, based on your response, you can have interactivity OR timeline syncing, but not BOTH). We are currently evaluating 13 on a trial basis and this loss of functionality would be a deal-breaker.
Hi Paul!
To allow interactivity, most users do not want this synced with the timeline. You can check out this article.
If this is something that you would like to see, you are welcome to submit your thoughts in the form of a feature request as this will go to our development team.
Due to this problem, we never upgraded to Presenter 13. We are now reconsidering. Any word on this issue? Surely, others must have had the same problem?
Just to be clear, I am not looking for a work around. This seems like a bug in Articulate. Why would the scrubber not work with an embedded .swf? To be honest, the only reason we are even using Articulate is as a wrapper for our Flash development (we need the scrubber, pause, forward, backward, etc.).
Please run the index.html file of the attached sample and notice that the pause button and the scrubber do not work as they used to in Articulate 09. The ball just keeps tweening, no way to pause or control it.
Hi Paul!
There has been no update since we last discussed this issue as the documentation shared here is the expected behavior of the files.
Not sure if anyone in the community would be able to further assist you here.
Thinks Leslie. With all due respect, I'm not sure that you understand the issue. In Articulate 09, the timeline of a Flash movie was tied to the scrubber bar. If you imported a 50 frame .swf, and then moved the scrubber to 50%, the Flash movie would go to frame 25. With the Articulate 13 version, the scrubber does not impact the embedded .swf at all. You replied that's the expected behavior. Then what is the scrubber bar for in 13? What is its function? Why even have one if it's not going to scrub the embedded .swf? Will you at least acknowledge that the scrubber bar behaves differently in 13 than it did in 09, even if it is "the expected behavior?" Having said that, this issue was from when Articulate 13 was first released. I was hoping that Articulate would have fixed the issue by now, although you're saying that it's not even an issue because a scrubber bar that does nothing is the expected behavior. I guess it's just for ornamentation then?
To help clarify, I've included an attachment from Articulate 09. When inserting a .swf, you had the option to synchronize the slide and the movie. The end result was the Articulate scrubber would control the inserted .swf. Are you saying that Articulate made a conscious choice to do away with that functionality in Articulate 13? If so, that is a big mistake since we have not upgraded our three Articulate licenses because of this issue.
Yes, it has changed. You can compare our documentation below for '09 and '13:
Presenter '09
Presenter '13
You could choose to turn the seekbar off on these slides if that is what is causing confusion. This can be handled in the slide properties for the slide with the swf file.
If your just using Articulate as a wrapper for scrubber functionality, why not just code it with AS3? AS3 has the capability to do that by itself. You could then just put it in a simple HTML wrapper and host it like any other index.html.
Thanks Leslie. The seekbar is not the problem. The problem is that our hundreds of courses have slides that are two or three minutes of explanatory animation synced with audio. At some point, there may be some minor interactivity. For example, "Now that you've seen how that works, click the 'XYZ' button on your screen to see a table" of some sort. You'd click a button and a table would open. Nice! Worked great in Articulate 09. We could use the scrubber to control the timeline AND have some interactivity in the Flash file. I guess with Articulate 13, it's one or the other. You can have the scrubber control your movie OR you can have interactivity, but not both. That's unfortunate and will prevent us from upgrading, since the built-in scrubber was one of the key benefits of Articulate. At this point, I'm pushing to make our own Flash wrapper with scrubber, forward, backward, volume, etc. Thanks Leslie. I'm sorry it didn't work out, but I really need some space. It's me, not Articulate :)
That's what I would like to do David. You're preaching to the choir. The advantage of Articulate was that it had all that built in, plus LMS calls, quizzes, etc. To create a custom Flash wrapper that would include all that functionality plus be dynamic enough to load pages from an XML file or something would take more time than boss man has been willing to spend in the past. Keep in mind that we're doing hundreds of courses, so the wrapper would have to be bullet proof. Thanks for the suggestion. If I had my way, we'd be doing that already.
Ive been there, i wish i could remember what it was called (found it then promptly used it for a long time). But there is a free to use HTML wrapper and JS SCORM wrapper out there for AS3 files. All I had to do was toss it in the directory with the rest of the files and it was HTML ready and SCORM compatible.
Used it reliably for a couple years. Im sure some digging in google can scrounge it up.
Im using storyline now with a new company cause they wanted a solution that didnt depend too much on the one guy who knew AS3.
pipwerks, i just remembered. Im not sure how viable it is now, but you might want to check out his stuff.
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