Articulate 360 & Native Mac Support

Hi there, Tim.  Thanks for reaching out for the clarification on using Articulate 360 products on a Mac.  This article describes the system requirements for using those apps on a Mac:

• You can record screencasts with Peek, our native screen-recording app for Mac. Install it from the Mac App Store.
• You can create beautiful, fully-responsive courses with Rise, a web app you can use in Safari, Google Chrome, and Firefox on your Mac.
• You can collaborate with stakeholders in Articulate Review, a web app for collecting feedback on your e-learning projects.
• You can grow your e-learning skills with Articulate Live by attending exclusive, online webinars hosted by Tom Kuhlmann and other industry experts.

Storyline 360, Studio 360 and Replay 360 can be installed in Parallels, VMWare and Apple Bootcamp environments.

We will be sure to let everyone know if we have any news on developments, such as native Mac versions, so always keep your ear out!

Hi Crystal!

Thanks so much for the quick response! Looks like you folks are really geared up with this new, very interesting release of Articulate 360! I'm having difficulty reading all the great posts and learning about the new platform - oh yeah, and trying to get some work done too! <g>

I didn't realize that Peek was a free app on the App Store. Thanks for that tip! I'm sad to learn that there still isn't a native Mac version of Storyline 360. As I explained in my previous post, it's difficult for me to manage large scale projects on my internal SSD on my (mid-2015) MacBook Pro due to SSD space considerations. I see the new crop of MacBook Pros can be configured with a 2 TB internal SSD - that would help my situation immensely but my budget won't allow for a new one quite this soon.

I'm now in the process of learning about the new platform and its components. I've done a load of reading over the past couple of days! My initial reaction is that it's really the Storyline 360 module that I need the most. A couple of the others would be a nicety but not critical. So, I'm busy evaluating Storyline 360 vs. Storyline 2. Once I've taken all the tutorials to see the differences, I'll download the trial and give it a spin. I'm glad to read that the two can co-exist with no difficulties.

I'm not fundamentally against a subscription model. I've been paying for an Adobe CC licence since its inception. It's all about the value received, not the absolute number. In the Adobe suite, I routinely use numerous modules including Premiere Pro, After Effects, Audition, Photoshop and Lightroom. So, at $50 per month ($600 per year) this represents a good value - even though I don't use or even install the many other modules of their CC product. And, they DO have a purchase model for folks who may need only one or two of the components. To me, that's a pretty good charge model.

However, I'd strongly encourage Articulate management to take another look at expanding the options - especially for smaller, independent developers who might not need all the power of the full Articulate 360 suite. After viewing the page that outlines the differences between Storyline 2 and Storyline 360, I'd really love to get some of those features found in 360. However at a cost of $1,000 per year, I really have to take a long hard look at the value proposition and what my various options might be. Frankly, up to now, I haven't even considered evaluating other competitive options.

Now, I get that I can stick with Storyline 2 - and in the short run, I may do just that. However, given what I've read in the posts about Storyline 3 - and how there is no target date or published feature set, that option might grow old pretty quickly. Again, all I really need is the Storyline module - but with the newer features only found in 360.

Again, I'm not against a subscription model, just please have more options at a lower cost if you don't need all the firepower of the whole suite.

Just some of my initial thoughts. Thanks again for the info that you provided.

Tim

I run my my windows VM off an external thunderbolt SSD with no problems. Have done this for over 2 years.

Thanks Phil. I've done the same....until I started having weird corruption problems on one particular rather large project. When I moved it to the internal drive, most of the problems went away. Are you running Parallels or one of the other options? Windows 10 Pro? Thanks again for the response.

I still haven't moved to Sierra yet - waiting to complete a large project in Adobe CC before I upgrade to Sierra and then subsequently to the new Adobe CC apps as well. Are you running Sierra? My thinking is that after I upgrade everything - including the new version of Parallels, I'll give the Thunderbolt 2 drive again for Storyline 2. Maybe something in the new chain of software will now make things more stable? We'll see!

I also run another program under Parallels/Windows 10 Pro called, ProShow Producer from Photodex. Now on that program, I've had no problems working from my Thunderbolt 2 RAID-0 drive (a G-Tech 8 TB model). And I've done many projects on it! Still, I wish they'd have a native Mac version, the same as I wish for Storyline! Those are the only 2 apps that I routinely run under Parallels/Windows. For everything else, I use native Mac apps.

Tim

I am running Parallels and Windows 10 64bit

I share everything with my VM which is probably against all of articulate rules as it means drives except C: are treated as network drives.

I run all of my projects from the dropbox folder on the Mac itself., I only use a 256GB Transcend SSD and the main reason for running it rom the external drive is to reduce the load of having two swapfiles running from one HD.

I native Mac App would mean I could dump Windows for good :-)

Hi Phil,

Thanks for the additional info. I *think* the clue of why you may not be experiencing problems is the SSD! Now that I think of it, I suspect that the corruption problems come into play due to the latency when the Mac OS spins down the drive to save wear and tear. Even my fast Thunderbolt 2, G-Tech RAID-0 box takes a second or two to cycle up after it has cycled down. I'm guessing your SSD comes up immediately - or close enough to immediately so as to not cause the latency thing. Hmm. A 512 GB SSD wouldn't cost that much to add and it would provide enough space for my typical Articulate projects. I may have to try this.

The reason I need the space is that I do a lot of video work. I often shoot using the ProRes HQ codec so it doesn't take long to fill up just about any amount of space. But those are issues for Adobe CC - and I use native Mac apps and have no issues there!

I'd love it if Storyline was a native Mac app. Might even be more apt to swallow the 1k/year pill sooner!

One last question - have you moved to Sierra yet? Wondering if that changes the stability issue with Storyline 2. Thanks again!

Tim