Blurry Notes text in the player - Storyline 2

Well, that is not happy news. Thanks for clarifying. Moving on to Captivate. Time is money.

Hi Justin;  thanks for sticking with this thread as we all voice our concerns! Also, thank you for explaining that some text is treated as vector (no possible blurriness).

While we'd all love to see an update to fix things, if we could know when/why image is used instead of vector, we could maybe design the courses to be using more vector text (?)

Just a thought.

Hi Gwen, 

When you include text on your slide, it'll be vectored as a part of the Flash output. So even if you choose to scale the player to fill the browser and are viewing in a high resolution monitor, it should still appear as you designed. The thread here does deal with the blurriness as a part of the slide player notes section, and that's the part we've shared with our QA team. 

Another time where you may see text that isn't vectored is if you're viewing the HTML5 output. This is by design as it's not vectored, and you can read a bit more about that here.  This will be especially noticeable if you've zoomed/scale the content or are viewing it on a high resolution monitor. Depending on your needs and situation you could look at not scaling the content or changing your story size to be larger and therefore display better on higher resolution screens. 

Thank you, Ashely, for setting me straight!

Very helpful information; I especially like the comparison chart available via the first page link you provided. (And I'll stop usurping this thread for things other than the blurry Notes section issue  :)

No problem Gwen - and always feel free to pop into an existing thread or start your own! 

Utterly shocked ....  This information should be on your 508 Accessibility page. We just purchased Storyline 2 as it said on that page you could add notes, it clearly failed to say of terrible quality.

Wish I had known this information when I was at the Storyline event in Dublin done by Tom and David.

Exactly.

Roberta Niche, M.Ed
Instructional Designer
[FULS

I wonder which problems will be in the storyline 3 to make us buy the storyline 4...

You are thinking about Storyline 3?...

This forum is stuck with Storyline 1 and cannot proceed to 2 due to blurry notes... :(

With no consideration whatsoever from Articulate management.

I attempted to update my original post to clearly share this new information, that this issue will not be resolved in Storyline 2, but I was unable to do so. I'm disappointed too, but at this point, I just want folks to quickly know the status of this issue and to encourage them to continue to submit feature requests.

By the way, if you haven't submitted this as a feature request, please do so at this link: http://www.articulate.com/support/contact/submit.php?form=feature

If more users mark Justin's response from 11/11/2015 as helpful, then at least it will appear on the right-hand panel when new users access this thread. (If you look at Justin's post from 11/11, click on the 'Mark as Helpful' text in grey, underneath)

I also agree with Laura that it would be a better practice to be upfront about the limitation of the Notes panel in Storyline 2, given that it is an accessibility feature. Alternatively, the Notes panel could be removed from documentation on SL2's accessibility features.

Hi All,

As a workaround, I wanted to share my process: Convert the Glossary tab to a Notes tab and use the glossary format to hold your notes (You can change the text associated with each element of the glossary/menu structure using the settings in the player menu).

For instance, I created a structure where instead of "Terms" I have "Sections" and instead of "Definitions" I have "Section Notes". The glossary tab exports to vector and text is crisp. The only caveat is in molding your notes content to the glossary format.

Cheers,

Hi All,

As a workaround, I wanted to share my process: Convert the Glossary tab to a Notes tab and use the glossary format to hold your notes (You can change the text associated with each element of the glossary/menu structure using the settings in the player menu).

For instance, I created a structure where instead of "Terms" I have "Sections" and instead of "Definitions" I have "Section Notes". The glossary tab exports to vector and text is crisp. The only caveat is in molding your notes content to the glossary format.

Cheers,

That's an interesting idea, thanks for sharing.

So, a course user clicks on each Section title to read the transcript for a given slide, is that right?

Really interesting idea and thanks for sharing here! It may help others if you're able to include some screenshots or a sample .story file here so that they could see how you broke up the notes into those two different sections and included that as a part of the glossary. 

I agree with the many other users in this thread that this issue is unacceptable, especially given that this issue never existed in Storyline 1! I also agree that it's appalling that it still hasn't been fixed (even though this issue was picked up a month after the software's original release in September 2014).

On the up-side, at least the Articulate team have actually bothered to test this issue in SL1 and have acknowledged that the issue did not exist in SL1... instead of denying it altogether, like they have in this thread here.

I understand that with software, there are often a few small bugs to address after its initial release, when end users pick up on a few issues that should have been identified and addressed in the internal QA process prior to release. This happens, and users are pretty understanding of this within the first 6 months.

Sometimes, in the instance of open source software, these bugs can go unaddressed for a year or longer as nobody is being paid to maintain the code. However, Storyline 2 is a product which has a long string of bugs found by users (or shall we call them the volunteer QA team?) which have been raised in this forum, logged as a support ticket and then left to 'collect dust' for years on end (e.g. this one and this one). This is totally unacceptable, because unlike open source software, the Articulate developers ARE getting paid and Articulate charges a significant fee for their product.

My suggestions to the company would be to:
1) employ some additional, highly skilled people to join your QA team to identify these bugs during the development process
2) employ more developers to systematically work through the long list of bugs identified by users of your software.

If the company's reason for not doing this is because their revenue is not high enough to afford this, I would say that if they actually invested in fixing these bugs, they would have a whole army of advertisers on this forum, shouting about how great a product Storyline is! Instead, their inattentiveness to the reported issues has turned these potential advocates into people who are now bitterly dismayed with their purchase of Storyline which is evident by the comments in this thread. This inattentiveness is also likely to be negatively affecting potential users/customers who read the threads in this forum. Who would blame them from opting to use another product, when they see that most threads here end with an Articulate rep saying 'log a support ticket', only to have no solution years later!). 

If any reputable software company released a product with such careless bugs as this one, I'm sure they'd address it by the subsequent update, rather than sitting back while their users choose to abandon their software to return to its predecessor, or choose another product entirely. 

Along with many others, I find Justin's comment appalling: "This issue is not something we currently have planned to address in a Storyline 2 update but a future version of the product." If the Articulate team is actually dedicating their time now to developing Storyline 3, rather than fixing unaddressed issues in Storyline 1 and 2, I find this ridiculous! Users shouldn't have to pay for a new product because the previous one they bought from the company was faulty (not to mention that the next 'upgrade' will no doubt have a whole list of new bugs for us to identify and then deal with or avoid altogether).

It is Articulate's responsibility to maintain the products which they've already sold to us, and ensure that they work as expected. In particular, I believe it's a reasonable expectation that there should not be any 'lost functionality' in Storyline 2 - that is, things that worked perfectly fine in Storyline 1! It seems that Articulate is only interested in 'wowing' and 'luring' in new customers, but is not too concerned with retaining existing customers. 

Where I live, if we buy a product at a store and it's faulty, we're entitled to a full refund. Many users on this forum have bought Storyline 2 and are unable to use it due to this issue (and all the rest of the unresolved issues in this forum). It's time now for Articulate to publish a full list of its unresolved bugs and offer us a concrete date by when each one will be fixed. Alternatively, we should be offered a full refund on our purchases. 

Does anyone out there agree with me?

Hi Kuriko A from Australia!!

You can see several responses under my name in this thread (click the "Over 1 year ago" link at the top. It was actually me who started the negotiation with Justin and brought him into this discussion, providing his "appalling" response as you have described it.

I agree 100% with every word in your post. You have described the situation very nicely and pin-pointed the issues to be addressed.

I am one of many users "stuck" with SL1 and cannot progress to SL2 or any future version.

I hope someone at Articulate will address this. I guess if this is not addressed we can someday see Articulate disappear from this market, leaving it to competitors having a better attitude to their customers.

I share your grief... :)

Best regards,

Udi from Israel.

I agree too !

I hope there will be a better product soon in the market to replace Storyline not only because of the many bugs but also the logic of Articulate : why the timeline is so "rigid" (so many points to develop here) why the organisation of the differents tabs is so tedious etc etc...

Sandy

Well said, Kuriko, Udi, and others. My shop has moved on to Captivate. We work too fast to deal with this nonsense. Frankly, the only way to get us to try Articulate again would be to make version 3 a free upgrade for all the poor people who paid for the unusable version 2. Not holding my breath! It's sad, really. The best part of the product is the community. I miss that.

Totally agree with Kuriko and others.

Bugs have to be addressed with an update, not in a future version. We paid for this software and it should work as expected.

Unless, as Roberta suggested, we are all entitled for a free v3...

I have been using SL2, and have to manually build each Notes section... I assure you, my department is no longer buying Articulate licenses until this is fixed... Most of us have gone back to Captivate. 

Hi all,

I wanted to jump in to assure you that we got the message and have escalated this internally. We'll share more information in this thread as soon as we're able.

Brian

I agree with the posts today.

Bugs have to be addressed with an update, not in a future version. We paid for this software and it should work as expected.

If the bugs will not be fixed in Storyline 2, then everyone who purchased Storyline 2 should be eligible for a free Storyline 3 upgrade.

Word of mouth is a powerful tool that can either make or break a business.  It will be difficult to convince consumers that Articulate's customer service finds it acceptable to identify a problem with a current version of their product and then charge the customer to upgrade to a new version.