Friday, March 28, 2008

Articulate - kids don't use it at home ;)

Well sometimes there is a need to share some knowledge with others. Sometimes you want to get some knowledge from others. And finally sometimes there is a time to do both at the same moment.
As we are interested how non-functional requirements influence software architecture we decide to ask some specialist. As it should be done nice and smooth we decide to take M$ Office and Articulate&Quizmaker tooling. In theory it enables people to build nice multimedia flash presentation from the power point one.
Well only in theory :P .
Problems you can face using Powerpoint 2007 and Articulate:

  • cliparts doesn't scale well

  • relative distances between some elements of slide are different from original ones

  • there are some additional sighs on the end of random lines of lists elements


Well you can of course live with it but what can happened when you decide to add quiz support (Quizmaker) ?

  • each new quiz slide destroys your animation synchronizations.


And as Quizmaker is intended to build some surveys how should the collecting user e-mail addresses look like ? I though it is nice and easy.
There are two options to get text from user:

  • short text - and I mean it's realy short - 24 characters so some addresses won't fit it

  • or essay - you can limit number of characters but text box takes whole page space which is ridiculous in case of e-mail inputs



Perhaps all this problems are my fault. Can anybody explain how to get rid of at least some of them ?

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