Interactive Articles
Aug 15, 2013
Hi all,
I am wondering if anyone know if we can use Storyline to create Interactive articles.
What I mean is, in our company there is a group who is writing an article and wants it to be more than just text, so more dynamic and interactive, where for example there is a map and the user is supposed to click on it to get more information.
The article will be hosted on the website, so the person came to me to ask if Storyline can be used just for that interactive part of the article? I guess I can just create a 1 slide storyline file and publish and link the article from the web to the storyline. I was wondering if anyone have come across something like this and how they dealt with it.
Not much IT support for any web developers to do it on the web.
7 Replies
I would think you could. Just copy the code in the html page that is used to display the SWF file. Make sure to copy all the assets to go with it to and place it in the correct directory. If they can add a regular .swf file into the article, they can add the storyline output. Or you can work in reverse. Add the article to the storyline output html and then link that page as your article page.
As much as I love it, I somehow don't think Storyline is really the best tool for this. You can fit the use case if you understand there are specific restrictions (a lot of them), but then again you can virtually do the same with just about any software.
Personally, for something like this, I would look into TouchCast ( http://www.touchcast.com/ ) or something similar.
Just my two cents.
Alex
Their was another person who posted a thread on how they used storyline to create interactive banners on their company website. The banner would ask questions or give some tips of the day to the viewers.
As long as you copy the published storyline folder over to the server, they can use the html iframe code to point to the storyline html page. It works kind of like russian nesting dolls.... flash within a page within a page.
the iframe code looks something like this:
< iframe src="....../SiteAssets/StoryLine/Multi-Language-Course output/story.html" width="690" height="470" frameborder="0">< /iframe>
Remove the spaces and adjust the path and dimensions to fit your needs...
You *could* use Storyline for those. It would probably work fine. Since you can use JavaScript to affect both Storyline and the browser there are some sophisticated things you could do with an embedded interactive.
Bret Victor (one of my heroes) describes these types of things as Explorable Explanations. He offers a framework for these called Tangle. This only works in newer browsers and requires some JavaScript know-how but I think these are fantastic.
http://worrydream.com/#!/ExplorableExplanations
Done right, you could use other JavaScript libraries to make the explanation come to life when it's scrolled into page view:
http://imakewebthings.com/jquery-waypoints/#shortcuts-examples
These guys used Storyline and the browser to scroll through the content at various stages. Lots of things are possible
http://www.brokencoworker.com/
@ Steve,
Thanks for the links, very cool. Will have to show these examples at my next team meeting. We are always looking for ways to up our game and see cool new stuff.
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