Last Slide Viewed (Call and Return Buttons) for Articulate Presenter

Although Articulate Presenter supports many of the hyperlink features that are included in PowerPoint, it does not support linking to the Last Slide Viewed, a feature that would be very useful in many circumstances.

I created a pair of Flash SWF files that can be used to give the Last Slide Viewed functionality to PowerPoint courses that are published using Articulate Presenter. The files ...

I took up the challenge of creating an Articulate community skin that covers the usual gray/black border that appears around the standard Articulate player. My skin is designed to be used in the slide-only view mode and enlarges the slides to 118% of the standard size to fill as much of the player as possible. No navigation features are included, so you have to create your own navigation buttons in PowerPoint, if you use this skin.

I recorded a short

If you are using PowerPoint to create presentations that you plan to publish for the Internet, you may have already noticed its lack of support for measurements using pixels. This is because the image size in pixels will render to different sizes on different output devices depending on the resolution.

Since I am using PowerPoint to create presentations to be published using Articulate Presenter, I know that the output resolution I want is 72 dpi and the default PowerPoint slide ...

A recent discussion in the Articulate forums prompted me to make the SWF files for a custom skin available to other Articulate users. All this custom skin does is place a grid over the standard Articulate player. It is very useful for determing the size and position of objects in your presentation. Take a look at this screencast for more information.

Click

Converting an animated GIF to a SWF file is as easy as clicking on Save As and saving the file.

Open your GIF in Fireworks CS4 and take a look at the states in the States panel. You will see that there is one state for every bitmap image that composes the GIF. There should be some player controls at the bottom of your Fireworks window that will allow you to play the animation right in Fireworks.

To convert this to a SWF simple choose File|Save As and select t ...

A recent question on the Articulate community forum asked:

I want to have several hyperlinks on one slide that open different 
videos while coming back to that same slide. I also want a slide 
in which the learner can read, choose to watch a video clip or 
simply move onto the next slide.

Here is one approach to this design. Create a slide with a list of the videos and make each item in the list a hyperlink to the slide containing the appropriate vid ...

There are essentially two methods to include a Camtasia movie in an Articulate Presenter presentation.

First, produce the Camtasia project for the web. In the example that I created, I used the default settings for a size of 640 x 480 px. You might want to make yours a bit smaller to be sure that it will fit on your slide in Articulate.

Once the Camtasia project has been published you have a choice of how to insert it into your Articulate project. Using the A ...

Have you got some old animated GIFs that you wish you could incorporate into your Flash or Articulate projects? The conversion may be easier than you think. Take a look at this short screencast to see just how quick and simple it is with Flash CS4.

One of the many things that you can control in the template for your Articulate Presenter player is whether or not Articulate creates a file containing a launch button to open your course in a new window. The selection comes under the "Other" menu in the Player Template part of the Articulate ribbon in PowerPoint. If you have the Launch in New Window selection checked, Articulate will create a file called launcher.html when your presentation is published, along with the player.html file. ...

Sometimes you may hide the gridlines in an an Excel worksheet inadvertently by creating a background fill for some of the cells. Or, perhaps you have received a worksheet or template from someone else and can't figure out to to show the gridlines. You verified that gridlines were checked in the show menu, but you still can't see them. Take a look at the short screen cast below to see how to solve this problem.

Articulate just released its most recent update to Studio 09, which is now compatible with PowerPoint 2010. Since I recently purchased Office 2010 and was waiting for this update to install it, I was anxious to test it out as soon as possible.

In this, my first trial, I was most interested in seeing how to create an different style of presentation rather than trying out every feature of PowerPoint 2010 and the updated Articulate Presenter. My inspiration came from an online gall ...

I just wanted to share a fun little promotional piece that I completed recently for the National Recreation and Park Association. You can find a link to it at http://www.nrpa.org/fishing/. Just click on the photo link to a video on the target page.

Please take a quick look and let me know what you think. It will only take about 6 minutes to go through whole promo.

This ...

In a recent project I created a custom skin for Articulate Presenter that included menu buttons and a "puzzle" picture that appeared as parts of the interaction were completed. One of the challenges in creating this piece was to correctly size and position the custom skin elements to fit over my slides and some Articulate controls that I left active in the final player.

After completing the project, I realized that a grid template in my Flash file would be useful for f ...

Custom Skin for Articulate Presenter

This is my first attempt at a custom skin for Articulate Presenter. I followed the instructions given by Dave Mozealous in his blog posting. In addition to the excellent instructions he gave, I would like to add the following steps that should preceed his process.

Creating Interactive Buttons

Regardless of the computer application in order to create buttons that have a three-dimensional feel, you need to create images to represent three different "states": the appearance of the button in the up position, the appearance with the mouse hovering over the button, and the appearance of the depressed position when you click on the mouse. These states are typically referred to as the up, over, and down states.

The ...