web design and development
This is a journey into the madness of Internet Explorer. Yes, there is a happy ending. Jump to the end of the post if you just want the solution and don’t care about how we got there. The Scenario You want to embed a Flash SWF into your HTML
How-to
I’ve been reviewing bug submissions for the SWFObject project and was reminded of a big problem with SWFObject 2.2: the JavaScript technique it uses for detecting Internet Explorer does not work in Internet Explorer 9. SWFObject 2.2 currently uses an IE detection technique proposed by Andrea Giammarchi
Apple
The problem 50GB+ iTunes library. Multiple Macs. How can you share the iTunes library between Macs? Solution #1: Home Sharing The answer Apple provides is “Home Sharing,” which allows you to share the contents of your iTunes library with up to 5 Macs. However, there are major shortcomings with Home
JavaScript
PDFObject is a JavaScript utility I created in 2008 to embed PDFs in HTML documents. It was modeled on SWFObject. Three years have passed since PDFObject 1.0 was released, and the browser landscape has changed dramatically. I figured it’s time to dust off PDFObject and see if it
ramblings
About a week ago I tweeted: from what i’m reading between the lines, #SCORM is dead to the ADL. they’re moving on. interesting timing considering #TAACCCT I had no idea how much hand-wringing and consternation my off-handed comment would cause. It apparently caused (directly or indirectly) some heated
e-learning
An abstraction layer is a way of hiding complexities and maintaining cleanliness in your application. For example, if you want to save a file in your word processing application, you simply click “save”, while a whole host of actions is performed for you under-the-hood. In this example, you’re shielded
ramblings
I bill myself as an instructional technologist, which means I’m often met with blank or puzzled stares. I thought it might be useful to explain my rational for using this title. Warning: this post may bore you to death, or cause you to get caught up in a tangled
ramblings
At DevLearn 2010, Ben Clark and I presented a session named SOAP for SCORM on behalf of LETSI. The topic was the LETSI Run-Time Web Service (RTWS), a proposed modification of SCORM to use SOAP for communication rather than the current JavaScript model. I presented the first half of the
ramblings
And so ends another whirlwind of a week known as DevLearn. Could the timing have been any better? My San Francisco Giants (yes, my Giants!) won the World Series and decided to have the largest parade in San Francisco history on the first day of DevLearn. It just happened to
ramblings
I’ll let the URLs do the talking: URL for the ADL’s “SCORM Documents” page: http://www.adlnet.gov/Technologies/scorm/SCORMSDocuments/Forms/AllItems.aspx?View={4D6DFFDE-3CFC-4DD9-A21A-4B687728824A} URL for the ADL’s SCORM 1.2 page: http://www.adlnet.gov/Technologies/scorm/SCORMSDocuments/Forms/AllItems.aspx?RootFolder=%2fTechnologies%2fscorm%
Project Updates
In 2008 I posted a quick writeup on how I dealt with cross-domain security issues for some of my e-learning courseware. Since then, I’ve had a lot of people contact me with various questions and requests for a working example. Tonight I decided to revisit the topic and whip
ActionScript
While updating my CaptivateController script I noticed there have been some changes to the Captivate variables available to Captivate developers. I figured I should document them for future reference. Note that some variables available in CP3 and CP4 are no longer available. The following list should be exhaustive for CP5;