Articulate on iPads?

Jan 31, 2011

Hi Team,

Was wondering how you plan to deal with the increasing amount of iPad users. I know that in my company they are running pilots with them but my Articulate courses won't run on them :( Are you looking into a Publish for iPad or other solution like publishing a course to HMTL5 or something like that?

209 Replies
Steve Flowers

Wallaby is cool. I rather like the idea of a client side interpreter for the encapsulated Flash assemblies better. Project Smokescreen is an open source project that seems to do a decent job with older functional sets.

What the HTML5 bandwagon fail to register is that while the Flash IDE is closed, the SWF format is quite open. The SWF format is a really nice way to organize encapsulation of media elements. I liken SWF to ZIP. Zips are everywhere. So are SWF's - why not think of them in the same way. Complex media interactions and multimedia assemblies could be expressed in the SWF format and neatly transport to whatever interpreter (Flash player, smokescreen interpreter) you choose. Lots of potential in this concept.

Unfortunately folks like Apple like to twist and fud practical terms into extreme language that clouds pragmatic decision-making... Flash is not a proprietary file format. It hasn't been for a long time. It's a controlled spec with a single controlling party that is motivated by a paying customer base to do their bidding. I don't see the problem

Steve Flowers

They can't... yet be used with Articulate. The wallaby and smokescreen tools are too early in development to support the full set of functionality included in the Articulate publish. I'm guessing we'll see a parse output from Articulate that supports a wider compatibility set in parsed output (HTML5 / Limited hybrid HTML output) before we see full maturity and fully functional equivalents from any converter.

I'd place odds that we'd likely see this relatively soon (I have zero insider info - just a gut).

Steve Flowers

Will Findlay said:

If you want to know why Apple has taken this stance, here is Steve Jobs's own explanation: http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/


Most of which is inaccurate (purposely or out of ignorance is anyone's guess) but it got alot of folks shaking their heads in an "oh yeah, Steve's right" fashion:P Contorsion of facts is a contorsion.

Will Findlay

Steve Flowers said:

Will Findlay said:

If you want to know why Apple has taken this stance, here is Steve Jobs's own explanation: http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/


Most of which is inaccurate (purposely or out of ignorance is anyone's guess) but it got alot of folks shaking their heads in an "oh yeah, Steve's right" fashion:P Contorsion of facts is a contorsion.


Agreed. There was also a response from Adobe... http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/04/29/live-blogging-the-journals-interview-with-adobe-ceo/

Although this was before Apple threw in the monkey wrench that made it "against the rules" to create apps using Flash as a tool.

Rob Nachum

susan cappelloni said:

So asking a direct question about Apple's determination to NOT allow swfs to play on their mobile devices. Why?  did i miss something here?   i work for a very large company in which i create training.  I would love to offer my student population the option of accessing swfs in the materials through an iPad.  What is up with Apple?  Someone please explain.

Pay attention, when ahm talkin; to you bhoy...

Wow, I'm sitting at an airport in Sydney at 0555hrs and am amazed/delighted that this is still generating such passionate "debate".

I mentioned in an earlier post in this thread that a clever colleague of mine said that iProds (nice pun) on their own outsell almost all of their competitors in a particular category (or at least the top 5 for the moment).

They are often the category creator and thus drive the followers, not a bad reason to be arrogant.

Don't get me wrong, I don't own a singe Apple device (yet...) and am waiting for the Galaxy 10.1 to land here in Oz.

But my soapbox is the eye on the prize for Articulate NOW...

COMPILATION IN AS3. Please.

Crap, time to board and I haven't finished my iMuesli...