Storyline 2 is now available!

Staff: Does SL2 have a total time/time elapsed indicator, like Articulate Studio? This was a major fault in SL1, and this subject alone will make or break an upgrade deal for me. Thumbs up for embedding video w/o compression (but again, that was also possible in studio).

Hi Sigurd, that option is not available in the Storyline 1 or 2 player.

Karl, If you've got something like that on paper you should be able to easily sort it out when you contact Articulate directly. I've got a similar process in place and it has always worked for me.

Seriously? How hard can this be? I don't get the "difficult to calculate time" argument. At least leave that choice to the user! I use SL mainly for video files. If i insert a video with 3.25 duration, then the slide will be 3.25. This is not rocket science. I'm not trying to be rude here, just frustrated, especially given that this was a feature in Studio.

Deffinately dissapointed with Articulate, I agree with everyone it shoud have been fixes, I was shocked when I realised what the £430 will buy you...Come on guys, It is a lot of money. 

So if I purchase Storyline 2, I will be able to import Studio 13 files?

Yes

So.. just for clarity. Do I need SL 2 to create courses that work in the Android Articulate Player?

Yes

Hi Ian as normal in storyline you need a trigger

http://www.articulate.com/support/storyline-2/how-to-temporarily-disable-or-hide-navigation-buttons

Ian - Are you referring to the feature that allows you to disable the next/previous buttons until the user completes? You can use a trigger to change the state of the previous or next button.

For example - In SL1, if you added a trigger to 'change state of', you would then select the On Object drop down. If you had an empty slide, all you would see here would be 'unassigned'. In SL2, if you add a trigger to 'change state of', when you select the On Object drop down (with an empty slide), you will see 'unassigned', but you will also see "Buttons on the Player", and below that you can select the Previous/Next button. From the "To State" drop down, you can then select 'Normal', 'Hidden', or 'Disabled'. Make sense?

Hi Karl.

I have asked that our Sales Support Manager, Sarah Schenone, contact you directly regarding your upgrade. From what I can see is that you had purchased the Rapid E-Learning Studio Second Edition Pro with two eligible upgrades. You upgraded to Studio '09 in October of 2008. In June of 2012 you used your final upgrade for Studio as a way to convert the license to Storyline. That would be the two eligible upgrades. We don't have an upgrade process from Studio to Storyline. The reason that you were able to get Storyline was by using your final upgrade to do so. I hope that makes sense.

Hi Karl,

My apologies. You're right that the response was a bit vague and I'll be contacting you directly to explain further and get you pointed in the right direction.

Sarah

Couldn't agree more. It would be nice to see other features in the SL2 update (like ability to print certificates or adding sound to glossary) but it was worth the money. I also like the fact that the owners of SL1 have a discount. I'm not sure I'd be able to afford over $1000 again!

It would seem to me a long term solution to update sticker shock price issues is to move to some type of subscription model. That would smooth out expenses for the users and income for Articulate and everyone would always have the latest version. With all this talk about Storyline 2 and the price of updating, it occurred to me I have not "purchased" software from any company other than Articulate in a long long time. (Microsoft Office 365, Adobe, etc.) Most of these are yearly commitments with monthly payments or pay yearly and get a discount.

That's not to say everyone would be happy all the time, because it galls me I have to pay extra every month for Adobe Captivate as it was not included in Creative Cloud.

I know some people don't like subscriptions as they never go away, but to me that's where everything in software has already headed so I'm sort of hoping this $699 I'm spending for Storyline 2 will end up being my last "purchase" of software ever.   

Todd

Oh! the CC and Captivate irritating and frustrating for a product i rarely use.

Hi Sigurd,

Sorry to hear that you're frustrated about the time calculation in Storyline.  You are correct that it seems like it should be a fairly simple thing to do.   I'll take a shot at trying to explain the difficulty in automatically calculating time in Storyline.  Let's start with Studio.

Calculation in Studio is fairly straight forward because the slides and the course are pretty linear in nature.  By adding the audio time on each slide, you can arrive at a total time for the course.  

However, in Storyline it becomes much more problematic because of the interactive capabilities of the tool.  For example, let's say that you have a branching scenario with 15 possible routes through the course and each route varies in time from 5 to 18 minutes (based upon reading the audio time).  If we simply follow the Studio example, we'd add the audio up for every slide (let's say it's 2 hours, 6 minutes) and display that as the total course time.  However, it's not an accurate number given that the learner isn't going to travel every route.    

Added to that, what if we are going to force the learner to successfully navigate a successful branch before they can complete the course?  This means that they might need to travel through the course multiple times (via various routes) before they finally meet the completion criteria.

As an additional complicator of time calculation, each slide potentially has multiple slide layers of content that may or may not have an easily calculated time.  For example, how do you calculate a tabs interaction with 6 layers where each layer has no audio, but rather, text to be read?  

I hope this helps a bit and we're definitely open to suggestions for how to effectively calculate the time in an interactive course.  So your thoughts are definitely appreciated!  Please feel free to send them via a feature request.  

Thanks!

Mike

Great explanation Mike, this is exactly the reason I've never used it in Studio as I tend to branch around a lot. 

Agree. I stopped using Captivate when they went to the subscription model because I only used it on occasion if the client insisted. I also just paid $500 for a yearly subscription to another tool because I thought a client wanted me to use it. Turns out they didn't and now I'm stuck with a licence that will expire in a year. At least if I owned the software I might be able to use it at some undefined point in the future.

Thanks Mark!

I've updated my original comments because, well, it is what it is. Thanks for your help and thanks for SL2. I know ya'll worked hard on it so that a polished, finished product was put out there. (It's amazing how much more that is important to me these days!)

For that you have my thanks for a job well done! 

Hi Mike,

Is there any chance that a real-time scrubbing timeline is in the worx as a patch or future upgrade?

Anything similar to Premiere Pro would be outstanding and iMO, much needed.

-Sam

I share some of the same feelings that most of the other people on this thread are expressing. I'm curious if Articulate 1 will continue to be supported and developed at all. I was really hoping for motion paths and the ability to add triggers to the timeline, but I can't justify the cost to upgrade for these features. Any chance we can get them added to Articulate 1?

I totally agree with you, Lars! This is really unfair. All of us that worked with SL1 that had to deal with all of the technical glitches and the number of upgrade features we requested and we still have to pay? I call foul. 

Not only that but one of the ongoing issues for many users of this forum was text rendering properly once you published. How many of us have to use a blank variable just to keep our fonts crisp in the publishing process?? That needed to be addressed as well! Clearly it hasn't.

Notice that the font doesn't even properly adjust when you use the built-in bullets too...

Hi Andrew.

We support the current and previous versions of all of our products, including Storyline. New features and enhancements implemented in Storyline 2 are not slated to be implemented in Storyline 1.