iPad Player: Using it in practice

Hi,

You need to get the Mobile Player from the iStore, (it's free), download and install onto the iPad.

Have a look here to see if it all helps.

Shout if you need more help.

Bruce

PS - Steve is right, should have mentioned all that, but if you just want it to play on an iPad it's all OK.

The iOS player won't communicate with the LMS (yet... the crew is working on TinCanAPI integration). Something to keep in mind. 

If you have trouble with specific content locking up or not playing, please submit any info you can gather as a support case. It's helpful if the support crew can also see the source and published output. I know the team wants the HTML5 output to be as good as it possibly can be.

Thanks to you both.

I'll try with a really vanilla test piece of content to see how it goes (no javascript or LMS API calls).

I've read about the mobile player not communicating with the LMS etc, and would be happy to just rely on HTML 5 if Safari just worked like the Android browser did - but it didn't seem to in my early tests.

I feel sure I'll have more questions due to Apple's 'ease of use'.

In the mean time, if anyone has any other thoughts on the ScormCloud/iPad combo it'd be interesting to hear about it!

Thanks again.

PeteB

Hi Group

The link below is from my Scormcloud accout to launch a test course. It plays fine for me in Android Browser and desktop browsers. I can't get it to play in an iPad Safari browser, however.

It has been published WITHOUT the iPad mobile player option ticked; i.e. it's HTML 5 only.

Would someone be able to confirm that what I'm seeing happens to them also, please?

Thank you very much if you can!!

Play Course (http://cloud.scorm.com/sc//InvitationLaunch?userInvitationId=5da0aaf2-78da-426a-b7e9-dc6f8eaf45c0)

Well, many, many hours with LMS, iPad and Android tablet at the ready, I've seen some stuff that doesn't seem to work well on iPad with HTML:

1. Don't hang your hopes on using Javascript to extend the functionality of storyline content on iPads. In particular, in trying to call the Javascript on the slide timeline seemed to make html 5 want to restart the course in a horrible loop.

2. Similar to number 1, I can't use LMS API calls to get learner names etc from the LMS.

3. I was, and continue to, have problems with layers on drag and drop interactions. My draggable items are on the base layer, but appear ON TOP of the submit feedback box - even if the feedback box layers are at the top of the layer list.

4. I setup some custom NEXT button behaviour with triggers and variables. Basically all 'content' pages should loop back to a central menu page UNLESS all content pages have been viewed in which case the NEXT button goes to a final summary page. This works as designed on Android and desktop, but iPad seems to get confused and just ignore the looping structure.

After this experience it appears to me that if you want to deploy to iPad with html 5 you might have to compromise what you WANT to do to accomodate what iPad will LET you do.

Android works like a dream; what you get on the desktop happens on my Galaxy tablet just the same.

Thanks for the link and the thoughts, Pete. I wasn't able to get past the Welcome screen using the iPad. Is that what you were experiencing?:

Would you be able to send us your .story file so we can take a closer look into the issues you're experiencing? Thanks!

Hi Pete

Thanks for having a look for me!

I've subsequently done lots of testing using Windows IE/Chrome HTML 5 and Flash, Android Browser HTML 5 and Flash, iPad HTML 5 and iPad Mobile Player app. In addition I've packaged for both LMS/SCORM and web package.

As far as I can tell it is all working as it should, including how and when Javascript works The problem I do have, however, is that in all the devices I've played with, None of the devices can render the HTML 5 in any kind of usable way.

In all of these devices, whether they use HTML 5 by default, or because I point to them at the story_html_5.html file, The pages load slowly, the layer on screens go out, navigation based on triggers and conditions aren't respected, pages won't load at all or drag and drop functionality doesn't work. This happens to a greater or lesser degree on ALL of the devices that support HTML 5 that I've tried - but not one would be considered usable from a client's perspective.

The Flash and iPad Mobile player app work great - but HTML 5 is no-go from what I've seen. I think part of the screen shot above is HTML5 is being rendered ( or not being rendered :-(

Thanks again for all the great feedback, Pete! If you're inclined, we'd really like to see some of your specific examples of the HTML5 content you're producing. Would you be able to send us a sample project or two which demonstrate the shortcomings you mention? Thanks!

Hi

We are running Storyline through a LMS (Saba) using .net e-learning courses with Storyline embedded in the content. However when accessing the content through an ipad using the Safari browser, Storyline does not play the content immediately - but stops with a "player" page with a thumbnail of the storyline content and a PLAY button. The Storyline content is first shown after the user clicks on the PLAY button.

Can we avoid this? We want the Storyline content to be shown immediately when accessing from a iPad Safari browser, so the user won't think of accessing another tool.

We publish to html5 without the iPad mobile player option ticked on.

Is there a workaround of this issue?

Thanks in advance for any reply.

Dorte

Hi Dorte and welcome to E-Learning Heroes! This is actually expected behavior and you can read about that here.  I am not aware of any workaround.

Hi Dorte,

If you're not afraid to get up to your elbows in markup and script, there is a tweak you can make to your storylinecompiled.js file to bypass this landing page:

http://community.articulate.com/forums/p/19353/114590.aspx#114590

If you want to permanently alter the template that feeds this published file, you can dig around in your application folder and alter it once. This is at your own risk, Articulate won't support it and you might need to reinstall if you break something

http://community.articulate.com/forums/p/19353/114592.aspx#114592

Hi Steve

Thanks - it works  

The next issue is now, that the Storyline application scale the content to fill the ipad browser window regardless of my fixed size of my story-file. We can see, that there are several fora discussing this issue - but haven't found any solutions. Do you know of any workaround of this?

Thanks again!

Hi Dorte! There is another thread here that specifically discusses this issue. Steve had a lot of input there as well. Perhaps it will assist you.