A couple of weeks ago I participated in the E-Learning Heroes Community Roadshow: Denver, and got to play around with Articulate Storyline 2 for a bit before it went live last week. It is now one of my favourite things! Now some folks are giving the product flack because they believed some of the enhanced features or feature add ons should have been included as a free path for Storyline 1…but hey! GET OVER IT! Storyline 2 is well worth the price, and for all it contains (in relation to course building), it’s truly a steal. Ya’ll stayed tuned for some video tutorials, but here are some of my favourite things so far:
Auto-Recovery – Now, some of the naysayers were balking a bit at this ‘new feature’, believing that in 2014 all programs should contain auto-recovery, but they don’t. And assuming your work will be auto-recovered just makes an ass out of both you and me. Last spring I was devastated when I lost a weeks worth of work, but I persevered and replicated my efforts in 8 hours (and it was all the better for the revisit I think). There’s nothing worse than a hard drive failure, a power surge, or the blue screen of death when you’re a week (or more) into your work efforts and realize in a moment of devastation that you have not saved for the last 6 hours. Storyline 2 saves the day with its new auto-recovery feature, and you will no longer have to worry about losing your work or finding work-arounds to avoid losing your work. With that being said, you should also use some common sense and back up your work frequently (as Taco in The League would say – “To the cloud!”).
Dockable Panels – I cannot tell you just how excited I was to see dockable panels in this version – SO EXCITED! Now I can move all of my panels to one monitor while I maximize my other monitor (or two) for development. AMAZING! Love love love this feature! My productivity will soar!
Slider Interactions – OH MY HEAVENS! Life has just gotten a lot easier for everyone wanting to use a slider-style interaction. I remember watching a colleague (shout out Michael Hinze!) demonstrate how he built a slider interaction. There were many, many, many states involved (think 100 or so). Now we can all create similar interactions with WAY LESS effort. It’s party time!
Motion Paths – Similarly, I watched Chris Perez create some amazing custom characters and accompanying animations at the Denver roadshow. Now that motion path animations are a thing, making some these animations will be so much easier! I think back to the specific example of the bowling ball moving down the alley which Chris had provided – motion paths will make this easy peasy!
Animation Painter – This is going to save SO MUCH TIME. Seriously. Now you won’t have to painstakingly re-program each and every animation. If that’s not a sell for your organization to upgrade…I don’t know what is (how about the previously mentioned feature favourites?)!
Now you’re probably thinking that the folks at Articulate paid me to say these nice things…NOPE! They didn’t! They just produce products that I genuinely love and use on a daily basis. With new product releases, there are always things that people will moan and groan about, but honestly – for the capabilities and cost, this product is one of the best in the e-learning industry. After using many other authoring tools in the past, I don’t see myself straying from Storyline for many moons.
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