Hello Again,
Lately I have been playing a lot with the Articulate Presenter SDK in an effort to help customers with various issues related to customizing the Articulate Presenter player. Part of the reason I think it is soo cool is that out of all the Articulate Presenter knock offs out there none of them have a Player SDK like Articulate Presenter does (they also lack many other features as well). With the use of Flash the Articulate Presenter SDK allows me to do the following:
- Add functionality by developing custom player tabs.
- Add player features by creating custom player toolbar items.
- Customize certain player assets.
- Communicate with the player via runtime API methods.
The reason that this is a must have for users trying to extend the customization of Articulate Presenter is that the SDK is very powerful, and allows you to do things that the standalone player will not do.
For example, I can create a custom SWF that I insert in each slide that will allow me to control the volume on a slide-by-slide basis.
I can also create a custom SWF that dynamically changes colors based on the colors of the player, which is cool if I am reusing a SWF in various different projects.
In an example that I created today I created a SWF that loaded in a FLV into a slide, then used the Player SDK to automatically advance to the next slide when the FLV video finished playing. Which is impossible to do in programs such as Breeze (or if it is possible in Breeze, it is very difficult to figure out how to do).
Articulate Presenter SDK (2:03 minutes)
So, if you are interested you should certainly at least check it out. For more information visit http://blog.articulate.com/wom/2005/07/18/articulate_sdk/
The Articulate Presenter SDK comes with the Articulate Platinum Membership plan.
{ 30 comments… read them below or add one }
Dave-
just checked out your demo. as we discussed I ended up doing the same-using actionscript in the swf in the presenter panel to move to next when the stream was complete. One thing I ran into was the duration display on the video (I included a controller) didn’t match the duration in the slide. My workaround was to insert silence of the appropriate duration into the slide so visually there wasn’t the distraction of the timings being mismatched.
Yeah, that is a great workaround, I have done the same thing with other presentations.
Can I change the navigation position from left to right side of player by SDK? If not, could you do this for me?
Hi Saeed,
Unfortunately the SDK does not give you the ability to do this, and because of the nature of how our player is built, this isn’t something that I can customize for you.
Sorry.
Hi Dave,
I am looking all over the internet for my problem and still haven’t got any luck. Finally I am here with some confident word from you. I hope you can surely help me on my problem. I am just using the articulate SDK and trying to get a custom tool added to my presentation. Everything is fine for me in local, but when I upload all the the presentation in the web, the custom tool is not getting load at the first time but it load when I do refreshing the same screen several time, its loading and working perfectly. I try to contact Articulate to get some solution on this problem but they clearly said there is no support on SDK.. So finally only the hope is Dave….
Kindly help me on this problem….
Best Regards,
- Varun
Hey Varun,
Sorry you are having some problems. Can you give me your Articulate case number?
-Dave
Hi Dave,
Finally we got the solution.
Everything is fine now. Anyways, thanks for your time….
Best Regards,
- Varun
Hi Varun,
I too face the same issue with the custom tool (Menu) that I created in my course using the SDK.
Do you mind sharing information on how you were able to resolve your issue?
Best Regards,
- Kumar
Hi Dave,
We have to QA of Articulate presentation , we have embedded this preso in our player which plays the content. Can i call articulate player functions like Play , Move to Next slide , Move to previous slide using Java Script. can SDK help here?
thanks in advance.
have a nice day,
M>..
Hello Mahipal,
The SDK could help there. I am not a Flash expert by any means, but you can use JavaScript to interact with a Flash file. If you built a Flash file that used the SDK functions like Play, Move to Next, etc, you could potentially interact with them via JavaScript.
-Dave
We have a similar ‘refresh’ problem as Varun. Could someone post what the solution is?
Also: The refresh does not help when launching the player with MSIE from our web server. With other browsers, it works. From other web servers, it works fine – also with IE. Has anyone experienced this problem?
I’m working with the SDK, but the only documentation I have on the API functions/methods/parameters are what’s on the Articulate page.
Trying to access the “attachments” portion of the presentation.xml file, so I can rebuild our own custom shell, and show the attachments files. This is being done from scratch, as we are creating all custom “stuff” in our shell. I have most everything else working, can get the Notes text using the API, slide number, etc… but can’t find any reference to the “attachments” so I can build a pop-up-ish window with that info in it.
Anyone know the API function I need to call, or parameter I need to pull from the GetSlideInfo() function. Example of how I’m getting the Notes text:
var o;
o = ArtAPI.GetSlideInfo(ArtAPI.GetCurrentSlide());
_root.snNotes = o.strNotes;
Then I set the field variable on the slide to: “_root.snNotes”
How can I do that for the attachments?
Next step: building an in-shell page menu from scratch…
Hey Dan,
You should be able to find the attachments in this part of the presentation.xml:
<References>
<Doc>
<Title>
<![CDATA[ Testing]]>
</Title>
<Type>file</Type>
<Data>
<![CDATA[ ao-import.csv
]]>
</Data>
</Doc>
</References >
Where ao-import.csv is the attachment.
-Dave
Dave,
Not that it’s really a big deal to parse it, but it’s soooooo much more clean when I’m using so much of the API already, ya know?
I was hoping there was an API function so I could call the parameters directly – but I think I may have to just parse the XML to get that data (just hate writing custom code to parse the XML when so much of the XML can be parsed via the API)…
Trying to build out as much functionality and take advantage of as much of the API as possible – we have a great graphics guy here who’s designing the skins, and I’m hoping to re-purpose as much of the API as possible to animate our own graphics in cool ways and not lose any of the functionality of the default skins. (as well as trying to create a few of our own…).
Thank you again for your quick responses!!! I’m sure I’ll be back here again soon asking questions!
Gotcha Dan, yeah, there is no direct API function for that, but yeah, it would be easier for you if there was.
Let me know when you complete one of your skins, it would be great to take a look at it.
-Dave
Hi Dave,
We have a unique(?) requirement from the client for quiz. For a SCORM presenter course, the client wants that the learner should not be allowed to view questions he already attempted correctly in the last attempt. i.e. only those question will appear in the subsequent attempt which are answered incorrectly in the last attempt. Is it possible to customize the quiz to this level through Articulate SDK? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Hi Vikrant,
Unfortunately that is not possible with the SDK. Currently Quizmaker doesn’t have any SDK, so you can’t do anything custom like that with it.
You could set up the questions in Quizmaker however to support more than one attempts, so they couldn’t proceed to the next question till they got it right…but that is about as close as you can come.
-Dave
Thanks Dave for the clarification!
Hello fellow articulate users. Can someone please tell me how to add a print a button to presenter that will allow a user to print the contents of the screen without hitting ctrl-p or some other method? Will the SDK help with this?
Hi Layon,
The current SDK doesn’t have any functions that enable that functionality…
Have you thought about posting your question in the Articulate forums?
http://www.articulate.com/forums
-Dave
Hi Dave,
Can we customize the font style and size of outline in SDK? And how?
Hey Kelvin,
You can’t expressly customize the font style and size via the SDK, but the SDK does allow you to build your own skins, including your own outline.
To find out how, check out this post:
http://www.mozealous.com/how-i-created-a-custom-articulate-presenter-skin-in-less-than-an-hour-2/
-Dave
Hey Dave,
Sorry for the old post resurrection:) I have a question about the SDK. I think I see the possibilities with the custom navigation skins, but it looks like folks haven’t been able to customize the playhead indicator for two way interaction (tracking and setting) as it works in the default articulate skins.
Can you tell me if it’s possible to completely customize the playhead in a way that allows fluid slide timeline control via playhead dragging?
S
Hey Steve,
Not sure I follow exactly what you are looking for…do you mean a timeline that reflects the entire presentation rather than just each individual slide?
-Dave
Hey Dave,
Nope. Was looking for a way to control the slide timeline using a skinned playbar. For example, in the default presenter control configuration under playerbar:
true
true
true
false
In the skins I’ve seen, the seekbar control isn’t active or doesn’t have synchronized control over the presentation. I can see where I can set the frame of the slide, but I don’t see a good place to see how many frames the current slide contains (I suppose there’s a good way to get this, but nothing I see in the API). A multiple of time would work, but it seems like the API only returns whole seconds.
Those true, true, true, falses should be the disableseekbarctrl, enableseekbar, etc.. within playerbar settings – tags were stripped.
Hey Steve,
Gotcha, but to be honest I haven’t done anything with building a custom seekbar, so I am not exactly sure how I would go about it.
Have you thought about posting your question in our Articulate SDK forum here:
http://www.articulate.com/forums/articulate-presenter-player-sdk/
I know others have built custom seekbars so they might be able to tell you what they did.
-Dave
-Dave
Thanks for the reply, Dave. I’ll get with our supply folks, they put in the order for the SDK – will need to get access:)
Hello Dave,
I am more of a GUI guy and am an articulate junkie. However, I am really interested in learning how to extend the customization via the SDK and plan to learn some code to accomplish customization. I was wondering if you could check the tutorial posted on this page (http://www.mozealous.com/projects/sdk/player.html)…for some reason it was not playing. Im guessing it needs to be re-rendered to play for the new version of flash. thanks
Hey Lindsey,
Yeah, unfortunately I built that project forever ago and no longer have a good working link for it.
Anyway, this post might be better for you anyway:
http://www.mozealous.com/how-i-created-a-custom-articulate-presenter-skin-in-less-than-an-hour-2/
-Dave