comparison between Articulate Storyline and Presenter features as timeline and scripting

[ziofonta222]

Hello everybody,

we came to a critical point now, having to choose the best tool to develop e-learning courses together with a big company, that since now had developed hundred of e-learning courses on a flash-platform based platform.

This company uses to develop first storyboard in Powerpoint, then a further step is required to inserting audio track to be synchronize with text and graphics, and to add second-level integration such as popup, callouts, buttons etc.

Flash has been abandoned because of low-ipad compatibilty as we know,  so we have made a first experiment with Articulate Storyline, and i must say it has lot of great features. We also tried to explore Presenter features, and i think it would be even a best solution, but there are important features missing in my opinion:

• a timeline management, to easily syncronize elements, expecially with audio, and to allow a better layer management.
• a minimum scripting (triggers) usage such as pause/stop, show/hide layers, buttons management etc.
• management of several kind of questioning and scoring and storing of relative informations to display a result

there are also other lacks, but these are the most important to me. I ask here if for some reason these feature are present and maybe i was not capable to find them out, and if in any case Adobe is managing to upgrade the esisting version of Presenter to allow these features.

I realize that Presenter is anyway a Powerpoint plugin, so the main engine to refer is Powerpoint itself, but we need to take a choice for the best tool actually available for this work (that i can say is the most frequent activity for e-learning purpose), and at the moment i must say that Storyline is the most appropriate tool.

Please let me have some opinions and considerations,

thanks

Daniele

[Lilybiri]

Daniele, in my opinion you compare two tools that have a different goal. You should compare Captivate, or even better the elearning Suite with Storyline (about same price eLS with SL), not Presenter alone. Presenter can be compared with Articulate Presenter, not with Storyline that has a different goal. Captivate has the features you are asking for, like scripting (check my blog on Advanced actions: http://lilybiri.posterous.com/), timeline, shape buttons... And in the eLearning Suite 6 you get Presenter 8 as well, but also Audition (best audio editing tool) and Photoshop with great roundtripping to Captivate. Other including applications like Flash, Acrobat, Dreamweaver... are certainly worthwhile as well. It is just an idea,

Lilybiri