Articulate Guru
I am finally in the twittersphere, and if you want you can follow me there:
I ocassionally tweet about work related things, like SCORM, Moodle, Articulate, or big references to me in recently released Articulate Studio books.
I also tweet about cycling, my dogs, and sports non-sense.
The Articulate Studio ‘09 book published by Patti Shank and Jennifer Bircher is finally available. Highly recomend that you buy it. Why you might ask? Fairly certain my name appears in the book at least once. Patti and Jennifer live close to me and we met up several times this past year to discuss some of the technical details of the book. Patti and Jennifer were also nice enough to send me a bunch of candy and cookies for helping them out.
You can order the book directly via the publisher and receive a 35% discount with coupon code art0586: Essential Articulate Studio ’09 by Patti Shank and Jennifer Bircher (ISBN: 9781598220582).
Congrats again Patti and Jennifer.
Good news for everyone looking for a solution that allows them to charge users for access to their Articulate Online account…it is now possible. With the release of the Articulate Online API it became possible to integrate Articulate Online with 3rd party eCommerce solutions such as PayPal. Over the weekend I built a working example using PHP to integrate an Articulate Online account with PayPal, and I give away the code to do it for FREE!!!
For a detailed explanation of how I did it, and to get the sample code, check out this page that I have created that explains it:
http://www.mozealous.com/?page_id=256
Questions or comments are welcome. If you decide to use the code let me know, I am excited to hear if anyone other than me ends up using it.
To see the example in action, check out my Content for Sale section.
Ooops. Sucks for the Nationals that nobody caught this jersey mistake.
Added another app to the list of AO API Samples over the weekend. It dynamically lists all the documents on your AO account and displays a cool little thumbnail of the first slide of each presentation.
For more info and get the code check here:
http://www.mozealous.com/?page_id=246
To see the app in action, check here:
http://www.mozealous.com/samples/listdocs/listdocuments1.php
Note: Sometimes the thumbnails don’t show on first load. Try refreshing if they don’t display at first until I can get that debugged.
Based on a request I have heard from time to time, I have built another PHP web app that connects to the AO API and will export all the users on a specified account to a CSV file. More info can be found here:
http://www.mozealous.com/?page_id=232
Added a new section to Mozealous.com this weekend… AO API Samples. We recently released the AO API which opens up a whole new realm of possibilities of what you can do with Articulate Online. For example, maybe you want to integrate your Articulate Online account with paypal so that customers can pay you to view your eLearning content, or maybe you want to automatically log users in from your site to Articulate Online. All these things are now possible with the AO API.
Anyway, in the AO API section of mozealous.com I am going to be posting some examples of applications I have built that use the AO API. My first application was a “Self-Registration” web-app that allows you to have users manually register themselves on your Articulate Online account. Well, if you are interested, find out more at the link below:
I now have 2 machines running Windows 7 at my house. Good news is that Articulate Studio ‘09 works well on both. I haven’t done a full test yet, and Windows 7 is still in beta, so no official support yet, but so far I haven’t run into any Windows 7 specific issues. Anyone else eager enough to move beyond Vista that they are running Windows 7 beta?
Following up on the post Anti-Virus Programs suck…a customer of ours just reported that several of the files that we install in Articulate Studio ‘09 is flagged as a potential threat by ZoneAlarm. We protect our DLLs and EXEs so that other malicious people can’t come in and steal our code or make nefarious versions of our programs. Doing this is not uncommon in the software world, many comapnies do this, including the anti-virus programs themselves. Yet some anti-virus programs like ZoneAlarm flag any DLL that has been protected by obfuscation are flagged as potential threats.
So each time we get a report like this I spend a considerable amount of time contacting the anti-virus company and asking that they no longer flag our software. In every case so far the anti-virus company has responded and identified that we were flagged falsely and they tell us it will be addressed in their next update. Unfortunately ZoneAlarm gives you no way to contact the company unless you are a paid customer. They do reference in one of their KB articles a way of reporting false positives (http://www.zonealarm.com/security/en-us/support/hot-issues-vista-zonealarm-computer-security-suite.htm#6), however, the email address that they provide is no longer valid.
You would think that Anti-Virus software companies would start to realize that falsely identifying a legitimate program as a virus is almost as bad as not catching a virus. In both instances a user is being prevented from doing legitimate work.
I would be interested to hear if people had recommendations for other anti-virus programs that don’t suck. I use OneCare by Microsoft, and for the most part, it is pretty good…in the past I have had success with Norton too.
Over the past several months I have been ocassionally been lending a technical hand to Patti Shank and Jennifer Bircher on the book they are writing on Articulate Studio ‘09. Well I am excited to announce that the book is now available for pre-order from Amazon here.
Here is the editorial review of the book that sums up pretty much everything that is covered in the book:
Essential Articulate Studio ‘09 is designed to help novice to intermediate users of Articulate Studio ‘09 get the most from using these tools-Presenter, Engage, Quizmaker, and Video Encoder-to develop quality informational and instructional materials. It was written with the following goals in mind: Help new users get up to speed as quickly and painlessly as possible; Assist users of previous versions of Articulate Studio (and previous versions of Presenter, Engage, and Quizmaker) in capitalizing on improvements made to these tools in the ‘09 versions; Provide tips and tools that make information and instruction faster, easier, and better; Help new and previous users develop information and instruction that is more valuable for the intended audience(s) This book is unique because it can serve as both a tutorial for the Studio ‘09 products and as a primer on designing and building good information and instruction with these tools.
If you are a new user to Articulate, or a novice user trying to become more familiar with the product I highly recommend picking it up.
Congrats to Patti and Jennifer on the book, I know they put many, many hours into getting this book written.
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