Articulate 360 Released!

After beta-testing for almost a year, I finally can talk about this with the world! Articulate has finally release a totally revamped release including all of their apps in a cloud-based model, and a bunch of new ones! From a “content library” designed to help with rapid production of great looking presentations, to it’s all new web-based responsive authoring tool, “rise”, this is a very exciting development indeed.  And best of all, there are new publishing options, including functional HTML5!!

Articulate Continues to Improve HTML5 Output

For those of you who already use either Storyline or Studio this should come as welcome news.  I’ve evaluated just about every application based authoring tool, as well as many cloud-based tools.

Articulate makes it easy to create great looking eLearning modules quickly and easily…

However, being a long time Articulate user (both Storyline and Studio), and having over 600 courses built in these programs, I have found the HTML5 output leaves much to be desired…it doesn’t work if your presentations are beyond a certain point of complexity (unless you use the Articulate Mobile Player). And this is not an option if you wish to host on an LMS (unless you use Tin Can API).

Using the AMP can be an encumbrance.  If you are in the corporate world, it is not uncommon to come across organizations that do not want their learners to have to download an app to view the content they purchased, and rightfully so.  Their expectation is that it should just work, and this is not unreasonable…

However, some good news for those of us with tons of courses built in either Studio or Storyline: Articulate recently put out a release stating,

“Our focus continues to be improving the performance and stability of our HTML5 output to the point where it is capable of replacing Flash.”

Some of you with simple presentations may not find this to be as much of an issue, but if you are using Quizmaker, Engage, or have complicated interactions in Storyline this should come as quite a relief.

Just speaking for myself, Adobe’s recent dropping of Flash, compounded with the fact that most mobile devices will only support clean HTML5 output (and mainstream browsers such as Chrome are dropping Flash support altogether starting next year) has created major problems.

And to top this, on average, we are getting hundreds of Flash errors from our learners every day.  This leaves us with only one real option, get our material out of Flash and into clean HTML5 that will work across all browsers (including Firefox and IE).  Here’s to hoping that Articulate can keep this promise and deliver a truly seamless HTML5 experience.

HTML5 output is not created equal, and every program produces different HTML5 output, with varying degrees of “HTML5 compliance“.

If you are a Studio ’09 or ’13 user with the need to convert or create new presentations today with seamless HTML5 output that looks great, that I have been unable to “break,” no matter how hard I tried, and work in all browsers on desktop and mobile, consider using iSpring as a stopgap measure until Articulate can deliver on this promise.

I will be posting detailed information on iSpring Suite 8 shortly in this section, but suffice it to say that it is the easiest way to to produce presentations to clean HTML5 today that will work in all browsers and mobile devices, and it is also extremely affordable, with pricing starting around $600.  Also—if you are accustomed to working with PPT and Studio, the interface and features are almost identical, making for a minimal learning curve.

If anyone is interested in a comparison of a Studio ’13 presentation in HTML5 vs. the same presentation converted to iSpring please contact me and I would be happy to give you a preview.