It’s every e-learning developer’s worst nightmare: you’re hard at work in an application, deep in development, when all of a sudden—the software freezes! You start frantically clicking around...
Published 9 years ago
Version 1.0
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Very useful thanks, I'll try changing file names (to use a restricted range of characters) and working locally and see if it helps the sudden data loss.
Not sure how it will help with the issue where you click in your document and suddenly it jumps you back some number of slides and all your changes are lost. That does not seem like a server/filename type issue, more like a bug in the main interface of the program.
I find it weird to find such flaky behaviour. We work on a server as a collaborative organisation and no other application (InDesign, other Micro$oft products, etc) give the same trouble, though they use the same file names and path names and networked drives.
Thanks for the info about working around the program's flaws, though, it will hopefully help us get some work done.
Not sure how it will help with the issue where you click in your document and suddenly it jumps you back some number of slides and all your changes are lost. That does not seem like a server/filename type issue, more like a bug in the main interface of the program.
I find it weird to find such flaky behaviour. We work on a server as a collaborative organisation and no other application (InDesign, other Micro$oft products, etc) give the same trouble, though they use the same file names and path names and networked drives.
Thanks for the info about working around the program's flaws, though, it will hopefully help us get some work done.
- Working locally is essential. I don't think it's an application flaw with Storyline so much as it is a conflict with backup/active malware detection. IT security/backup/update processed often interfere with tools like Storyline, and IT rarely understands how Storyline works, unless they work with software developers.
Remember that course developers are actually software developers. We may not be code warriors, but we are producing executables that send data from a local system, which resembles malware to aggressive/clunky security software. Storyline is going to react differently than tools like InDesign or most Microsoft products. Those don’t generate executables; Storyline does.
Backup software can interrupt normal authoring tool functionality, in particular when you are publishing and you have a large or complex project. It was such an issue at one gig I had that we ended up getting approval to store our working files at the root level, outside of the normal user document path (not Storyline, but similar application). Once our working folders weren’t getting probed every five minutes by “helpful backups,” we stopped experiencing the lost work and file corruption.
I’ve acted as first line of support for instructional developer teams I’ve worked on for years (I came from a tech support background). By far the most common issues have been caused by working from a networked copy, and lax saving habits. The next most common issues are a tie between missing administrative privileges for Storyline (and related tools), and working with ancient and complicated course files that had been imported without being cleaned up.
It would be useful to have better documentation for how security/backup software can impact Storyline, if only to say, we instructional developers are in fact special, unlike 95% of the computer users in an organization.- Many thanks. I do not quite understand the point about executables. We are writing slides and publishing to HTML.
Also, the problem happens while working in the Articulate GUI, just clicking in text boxes or whatever. Not while saving or publishing.
That's why I was wondering about a bug in the Articulate code. (Just thought I'd explain.)
Thanks again. - Thank you for leaving your detailed comment, Jennifer. Always valuable to learn from the experiences of others.
- Hi there Darren!
What you're reporting definitely sounds like it's a bug or issue, definitely not expected behaviour! Please submit a support case here so we can help you identify the issue: https://articulate.com/support/contact
