Option to Publish to Flash
December 18, 2007 12:00 AM
I'm going to chime in for just a second here. Personally I think that being able to publish to Flash would be very cool, but I don't know if I can ever see it as an option. Now that there is flash player 9 and Actionscript 3 it makes things a lot more difficult. Lets say, for example, that Lectora would publish to Flash player 9 and Actionscript 3. That's great and all, but anyone who is trying to use an Actionscript 2 animation could have problems becuase there is no reliable way to communicate with it from an AS3 player. How many times do we see people wanting to use Lectora to Pause, Play, Stop, etc... none of the flash commands would work. If Lectora only published to Actionscript 2 and Flash Player 8, no one could use AS3 content because it just wouldn't work in the final file. In addition to technical issues I'd be interested to see how much of the Lectora user base would use the "publish to flash" option. I know of a lot of large corporations who don't even allow the flash player to be installed on corporate computers. Anyhow, my guess is in the end it's just not worth the headache to try and put that functionality in - I can already see the insane amount of support calls Trivantis would get because someone's custom animation "wasn't working" when the course was published to flash.Just as a side note, I did develope one full course that consisted of a flash shell that went on each lectora page, then I just used parameters to tell the shell what flash content to pull in and play... The only thing I used Lectora for was to hold the course structure, handle the LMS communication, and tell the shell what to load and play. It actually worked really well and the development time was significantly less than what it would have been if I tried to do it all in flash. Doing something like that is pretty similar to a course where each page is it's own flash file. If anyone is interested in that type of approach let me know and I can give you some tips on how to set things up.All that being said, I would be interested in seeing an option to publish a course to Adobe Air. Of course people would have to have the air player, but it would solve all of the cross platform issues mentioned above...Ok I'm done. Please don't hate me for backing up trivantis on this one :) Of course now that I've said all of this, I can already see the new Lectora box with "Now publishes to Flash" in big bold letters...
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