Screencast bug, Storyline tabbed interface, nested lightboxes

Oct 08, 2013

Hello to the Storyline Community! I've just completed my first Storyline project, and like most Instructional Designers I'm thrilled. To the Storyline team, great job!

I had a number of adventures, and some intractable problems that searching the Forums was a real help with - no solutions, but pretty good workarounds. I'm left with three "adventures" that I'll relate here.

1. Screencast bug. I was recording a procedure in Windows, and one step was to create a new folder. I thought I'd save a few steps by using the Windows shortcut key combination, Shift + Ctrl + N. While I was recording the screencast I must have held down Shift + Ctrl what, maybe a tenth of a second before pressing N. Imagine my surprise when I inserted the screencast into a scene:

  • ... previous actions
  • Slide 7          Press Control
  • Slide 8          Press L Shift Key
  • Slide 9          Press Control
  • Slide 10        Press L Shift Key

...

  • Slide 73        Press Control
  • Slide 74        Press L Shift Key
  • ... following actions

That is, I think Storyline sat there recording multiple keymatic repeats of Shift + Ctrl after I pressed these keys, but before I pressed N. Luckily, Storyline caused the problem, and also privided the solution: because of its great implementation of Try Me mode as ordinary Storyline slides, I was easily able to delete all the redundant slides. The only remaining inconvenience was the extra 20 megabytes the screencast added to my source code. As expected, when I published the course, only the slides I actually used were included, and the published size was quite modest.

PS I did discover that I couldn't ask the user to press Shift+ Ctrl + N in a published lesson, since that is apparently a reserved Flash keystroke combination. Research on the Forums showed me that this is a common difficulty (especially with Function keys), and suggested several workarounds.

2. Storyline tabbed interface. This is a feature request. The tabs in my Storyline interface showing different scenes are arranged in the order in which I launched them from Story View. When there are a lot of scenes, this makes it inconvenient to locate the tab for, say, scene 5 out of 12. Why not make the tabs draggable among themselves, so that they can be rearranged (eg in number order)?

3. Nested lightboxes. Some of my quiz questions have hint links lightboxing a slide that helps the student find the answer. Then I have a "quiz review" slide which lightboxes the various quiz questions for review/retry purposes. Imagine my delight when I discovered:

  • A lightboxed slide has full functionality, so that the student revisiting a lightboxed quz slide can re-answer the question (I enabled lightbox navigation, so there would be a Submit button only).
  • The full functionality of the lightboxed quiz questions extends to the hint link. Clicking that brings up the hint slide as a lightbox-within-a-lightbox. Since the un-navigable hint lightbox is slightly shorter than the navigable question lightbox, the nested state is visually quite clear.

I haven't done any experiments with deeper nesting. Does anyone know how many levels of lightbox can be nested?

Eric

6 Replies
Adrian Dean

Hi Eric,

Welcome to Heroes! Let's take these number by number.

Number 1: Based on your description, I have been unable so far to reproduce the issue with the Shift + CTRL keys that you experienced. I will continue testing, but any further insight you can provide, would be much appreciated.

Number 2: I have submitted your feature request on your behalf. You should be getting an email here soon noting so. If you have any further requests you would like to make, please do so using the following link.

Number 3: It hasn't been tested, but I don't believe there is a limit on the amount of levels lightboxes can be nested. If anything, the only constraint will be the amount of memory being used.

Always Happy to Help,

Adrian

Eric Halsey

Adrian,

Thanks for your kind attention to the screencast issue. To provide more grist for your mill, I will attempt to send you the offending screencast, as part of a story where it is inserted as Try Mode in a scene. I'm not sure this will upload, since as I mentioned above, the redundancies in the screencast make it quite big. But here goes...

Ladd Skelly

I think I discovered the Press L Shift Key issue. After the Try Mode recording of an online management system, this caption showed up on each screen that tried to emulate the typing. I think it has to do with how Storyline interprets the typing from the system. Perhaps, when I click the text box to begin typing, the software thinks I am using a key stroke. Unfortunately, I don't have a work around on this. :-(

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