Black screen when loading .html file on Android/Flash Device

Hi Renee,

It sounds like the flash player is not installed.  With most Droid's the Flash player needs to be installed from the Play store.

A couple of questions..

• What kind of droid devices are you targeting; tablets, phones or both?  Phone screens, for the most part, are too small to provide quality learning.
• What version of android do most of the devices have?
• How much do you know of the target hardware?
• Do you have audio or video at the beginning of the course.
• Are you sure you're getting the flash version?  The url should have story.html at the end.

I've been testing on a Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 7", Motorola Xoom and a couple other lower end tablets, and for the most part have had good results playing flash content.  There is a bug between the OS and Flash that doesn't allow the keyboard to open up for input fields.

On a side note, be aware that Adobe will no longer provide a flash player for 4.1 (jelly bean) and beyond.  So the days of flash on droids are limited.

Hey Bill,

Thanks for the quick response. 

I had thought about the Flash Player and am glad you mentioned it. I will make

sure the LMS manager who was testing it makes sure to check the Flash Player and 

version on our test tablets. 

We are targeting tablets only, in particular, Lenovo Tablets running Honeycomb. We will probably eventually be looking at Ice Cream Sandwich, and Jelly Bean too.

We make our products, so we know a lot about our own target hardware, but we have just started surveying our (internal) target audience for more information on the types of devices they will be using for our training. We would like to optimize our training for our own devices, but will probably need to reach folks using other devices as well.

We do not have audio or video at the beginning of the course, although I did see that html5 Storyline output does not support audio and video playing at the same time. ;(

I am sure we are loading the .html file. Is it possible the device is retrieving the wrong file, any way to check?

We are aware that Flash is not going to be supported (soon) and that is why we are trying to develop an html5 mobile training solution using Storyline. We are starting with flash output because it's easiest to test for usability issues, features support, etc....

Thanks!

Renee

Hey Renee,

You can force which version to play be changing the html file at the end of the url.

Flash - http://YourCoursePath/story.html

html5 - http://YourCoursePath/story_html5.html

The story.html will redirect by default to the best viewing option; that being Flash if available.

Ok, 

Making some slow progress, but any progress is good.

So we did some troubleshooting and the LMS manager had renamed the path to call index.html instead of story.html.

We were able to load the story_html5.html file successfully through the android (Chrome) web browser. 

Still having a couple of strange things happen, that perhaps you have heard of before. 

1) In Android Honeycomb, there are 2 browser modes: 1) mobile and 2) desktop

We could only load the file in desktop mode. 

We upgraded the OS to 4.0.3 and it loads fine now. 

2) In version 4.0.3 of Android using the Chrome browser, tapping the navigation buttons (we built our own instead of using the built-in player buttons) causes the entire screen to flash a blue color. I played with this for a second, and this happens anywhere on the display, even if you tap an area that is not an active button. 

The button still functions and advances the user forward or backwards through the course, but it's distracting to have the screen turn blue every time a button is tapped. 

Any thoughts on these issues?

Also, do you have any insight as to when simultaneous audio/video playback in Storyline's html5 output will be supported?

Do you know if we can get around it by embedding the audio in the video/screencaps we are using?

Thanks again for your support,

Renee

Hey Renee, 

Do you think you might be able to share your .story file with us so we can take a closer look at the "blue flash" issue? We'd really appreciate it, and want to know if it's something we need to get worked out for future builds. 

As far as the simultaneous audio/video playback in HTML5, it's something that's on our radar, and as HTML5 continues to mature, we're hopeful we can get those kind of limitations resolved. 

Thanks for posting!

Hi,

Sorry for the delay on this. We are interested in getting the .html5 file to load correctly on a Lenovo Android based tablet. 

We are able to load and view the file through the Chrome browser, but there is an interaction issue: Interacting 

with navigation buttons, or clicking anywhere on the player, causes the entire screen to "flash blue" and momentarily become 

inactive. 

I have attached the test file we are working with. Please let me know if you can duplicate and/or resolve the issue. I have heard of 

a similar problem with flash files in general, as you need to "activate" the engagement field by tapping somewhere on the screen before the navigation elements can be used. 

Cheers,

Renee

Hi Renee, 

Thanks for the file. Would you mind going ahead and sending it straight to our support team? They'll be able to test it and try to replicate the issue on the proper device, and work with you to figure out what might be going on. Thanks again for posting.