Storyline 360 - what's changed?

Hi there, Roger.  First, thanks for checking out Articulate 360, and also for taking the time to tell us what it's been like so far!  I noticed that Alyssa was able to provide a hand with the Chinese interface here, so let us know if that is fixed for you.

1 - There are some things that you can't preview while building your course, and JavaScript triggers are still on the list.  We recommend publishing and previewing the output of our course to ensure that it works in the browsers and devices to which you intend to deploy your material.

2 - I hear you on the desire for a more advanced JavaScript editor.  As we have users with all different abilities, I'm guessing that would be handy for those of you with mightier skills.  Could you let our Product Development team know more specifically about your needs?

3 - I just want to clarify so that I can do some testing.  It sounds like you are using the playhead at the bottom of the timeline panel.  Is it during that playback that you're noticing the hotspot persisting when it shouldn't?

4 - Thanks for submitting the bug reports.  Again to clarify, you sent those reports out of the "Storyline has stopped working" dialogue box?  That information goes to our QA team, so thanks again for that.  I'll be sure that we can investigate in Storyline 360 with our support team.

I'll do some testing for points 3 and 4, and I'll update you once I have some information.  Thanks, Roger!

Hello again.  I've got some further information to share:

Using the Timeline preview play buttons

The playhead on the timeline won't truly scrub through the slide timeline when you're previewing.  I did some testing to run through the different actions you might take when using that function.  

• When I clicked the play button and let the timeline preview run all the way through, the hotspot (and other content, like a text box) only appeared on the slide when it was supposed to according to its position on the timeline.  
• When I clicked play and then clicked on the playhead to scrub to certain parts of the timeline, all the content that is on the slide showed.  Effectively, clicking the playhead stops the timeline preview and returns you to the slide view.  If you again click play, the preview will begin properly at the playhead and only show objects as they appear on the timeline.

So the timeline preview is doing what it is designed to do, but I don't think it's doing what you want it to do.  I can see you might have a need to be able to make adjustments based on what the slide will look like at that point in the timeline while doing the preview, so that would make a good feature request.

Storyline crashing when previewing a slide with video using the timeline preview

I wasn't able to reproduce what's happening on your end.  Can you have a look at my video here and let me know at which point you're getting a crash?  What is the format of your video?  Are you working on your local hard drive, and is the video originally stored there too?

Thanks for working with us!

I think one of the biggest, and most important, features promised is better HTML5 playback. Projects played on iPad have been fraught with problems in previous versions of SL. Hopefully, this has been substantially improved with SL360. I'd pay for that alone, even if nothing else changed.

Crystal, thank you very much for the detailed responses. While I'm disappointed that Articulate didn't implement the features I was hoping for, I do realize I'm just one customer.

That said, there isn't really a compelling reason for me to upgrade to Storyline 360. I haven't tried the other 360 products so they may be quite good.

I will read through your reply in detail and respond this weekend.

Regardless of how I feel about Storyline 360, I am impressed with Articulate's community involvement like this discussion board. Thanks!

Roger J.

HI Crystal, I've submitted a feature request for the JavaScript editor.

I am looking for a truly "scrub-able" timeline - I think a lot of people would benefit from this feature. Please consider this, especially as you move to a subscription model that continually charges people for the software.

As a side note - when trying to align objects and video (timewise), so objects would appear when the video reaches a specific point in time, moving the playhead does not (at least in Storyline 2) always yield correct results. After a while, the video and the timeline seem to get out of sync. This was very frustrating on a previous project but I managed to complete the project.

Regarding the crashing when playing a video, I'll see if I can take a video :-) of it happening.

Thanks,

Roger J.

That's encouraging to hear, Matthew. I was still disturbed to see an old problem (dropped elements) in HTML5 output.

The dropped element problem is intermittent and doesn't happen with any consistency. We do receive about 2-4 emails a week about missing audio, usually on an iPad but not always. This has been going on for years. Sometimes a graphical element won't appear, but users don't always notice that since they don't necessarily know what should have been there to begin with. 

The dropped graphics happened to me today (on iPad) on the first SL2 project I republished on SL360. It was some title text on the first slide.

Hey Roger, one thing that makes the JavaScript testing a little easier in SL360 is that you can now publish a single slide. And you can publish directly to The online Review tool which enables you to test in an online environment. 

I have included it in a bug report, but this is such a longstanding problem I think it's not likely something that's going away any time soon.

Thanks, Roger.  Every voice counts!

Really good to know - thanks!