Using the object element to dynamically embed Flash SWFs in Internet Explorer
This is a journey into the madness of Internet Explorer. Yes, there is a happy ending.
Abstracting Your Course’s Tracking Code
An abstraction layer is a way of hiding complexities and maintaining cleanliness in your application. When integrating tracking support (SCORM, AICC, etc,) into an an e-learning course, it’s a good idea to abstract as much of the tracking code as possible. Here are some examples.
Rule of Thirds tutorial
Rule of Thirds is quick and fun tutorial explaining the concept of the rule of thirds as used in visual design.
IFrames and cross-domain security, part 2
About six weeks ago, I wrote a post about some issues I was encountering with iframes and cross-domain security. I promised I would write about whatever workaround I decided to use; this post details that workaround.
Dealing with Internet Explorer in your JavaScript Code
It’s almost the end of 2008, and thanks to the hard work of web standardistas, browser vendors, and JavaScript framework developers, cross-browser JavaScript code is much less of an issue than it used to be. Even Microsoft is feeling the love — the upcoming Internet Explorer 8 will be a (mostly) clean break from legacy Internet Explorer releases and will behave much more like Firefox, Safari (WebKit) and Opera. …And they rejoiced.
So why is it that when I look under the hood of some recently produced web pages (learning management systems, courses produced by e-learning rapid development tools, general web pages, etc.), the pages’ JavaScript often includes incredibly out-of-date and bad-practice Internet Explorer detection?
Here’s a quick rundown on the dos and don’ts.
Installing Parallels Tools (v4) in Ubuntu 8.10
I had a hard time sorting this out, so I figured I’d post it in case anyone else needs to know.
Assumptions: You have Parallels v4 for Mac, and have already created an Ubuntu 8.10 image.
Control a Captivate SWF using JavaScript: The basics
JavaScript can control the playback of Captivate-generated SWFs. I posted some examples about a year ago (example one, example two), but someone recently reminded me I haven’t posted any instructions or explanations for my examples. Here’s a quickie explanation of how you can control a Captivate-generated SWF using JavaScript.
Send Captivate Quiz Data to JavaScript
Adobe Captivate 3 doesn’t have a built-in mechanism for sending quiz results to JavaScript. Here’s a workaround you may find useful.
Adding SCORM code to an HTML file using the pipwerks SCORM wrapper
Learn how to add SCORM code to a plain HTML file. This example uses SCORM 1.2 syntax, but can be converted to SCORM 2004 without much effort.
How to add basic SCORM code to a Flash movie
Here’s a quick tutorial for adding basic SCORM functionality to an existing Flash file. This tutorial aims to demonstrate just how easy it can be to add SCORM functionality to an existing Flash movie.
Please note that this tutorial uses ActionScript 3 and SCORM 1.2, but the same principles apply for ActionScript 2 and SCORM 2004.