I hope its of value and adds to the subject area. Thanks!

I agree that Articulate is closely tied to Microsoft and PowerPoint. It also presents a strategic risk to them. Ideally a company would want full control over their destiny and not be tied to a Redmond API. A standalone app provides that. They’ve got a great start, staff, and support. They could create a separate app with the market need features – both Windows and Mac. Just look at Qarbon for a cross-platform example.

I’ll keep my fingers crossed for Adobe’s Captivate in the meantime.

Scott

Here’s a link to one of my posts if you want to have a look at the avatar and perhaps “adopt” it. It’s potty trained and doesn’t chew on furniture.

Regarding Articulate for Mac – their apps are so tightly tied to PowerPoint, particularly the 09 Suite and PP 2007, that I think the odds of an Articulate app for Mac are slim at best. I don’t think PP for Mac offers the type of external app integration that the Windows version does, and Keynote almost certainly offers none.

I’m not holding my breath.

That said, Adobe is working on Captivate for Mac and TechSmith is working on Camtasia for Mac (and perhaps someday SnagIt). So the Mac platform is not being completely ignored in the eLearning development market any longer. And for that I’m thrilled.

The SWF export from Keynote ‘08 didn’t work that well IMHO. I don’t think you’d get much out of it. That’s probably why they removed it from ‘09. I tried to create a Flash based type tutorial with it once and quickly gave up.

Articulate still reigns supreme here. They do have the best support and the most Mac-like fans. Staying together on their forum would keep our voices strong. It’s a good suggestion, Jenise.

@Chris, I’m glad you still can’t find Tom K’s suggestion. I looked myself and came up empty too. I chalked it up to old age but now that the younger guys validated it I feel better.

@Tom, are we missing anything?

Love your blog! Let’s congregate on Articulate’s forums, but making sure we play very, very nice.

Their support team is #1 in my book, and we want to maintain these awesome relationships. Articulate Support has gone over and above when I’ve needed them.

Start “Mac” topics on their forum?

I, too have been thinking this year about Articulate’s dependence on MS PPT.

I do love what MS added to PPT 2007… really great enhancements, but I’d like the option to use Keynote with Articulate as well.

As for Keynote, I want to buy it, but I hear the newest version does not publish to SWF anymore. Do you know how I can ethically purchase the previous version?

And, don’t forget the rabid Articulate fans who are Mac fangrrrls!!

Articulate and Mac, with iPhone/m-learning functions… (”Publish to iPhone)…. ah!

I’d be the happiest designer/developer on Planet Earth. Or, the 3rd happiest as Chris and Scott would be in line ahead of me.

@Tom,

Is there another “trick” to make PPT 2007 “sub-indent” w/out creating bullet points?

Yes, an iPhone version of OmniOutliner would be awesome. If Omni doesn’t do this, perhaps there’s an opportunity there for someone else. I love Cultured Code’s to-do app for iPhone (and Mac) called Things. I’d love to see an outliner and/or mind mapper app that followed their design philosophy. I wish I’d had the foresight to start learning iPhone programming a couple of years ago – I could be a rich man right now.

I’m glad to hear that PowerPoint really doesn’t seem to allow sub-slides and sub-sub-slides in Outline view as I thought I was just being dense or crazy. Unless Tom has a special insider build or has access to a super secret PowerPoint feature the rest of us don’t.

I’ve not been able to find anything via Google regarding sub-slides in PowerPoint either. I think Tom may be looking at indents that appear as bullets on a single slide and not indenting (subgrouping) entire slides themselves?

Great discussion, thanks for initiating it.

Outlining is a critical step and one I advise clients to do all the time. Word is useless. I’ve advised people to use the PowerPoint outline feature because it “sort of” works. At least they can rearrange slides easily. But to your point, I can’t figure out how to indent another slide and make it a sub-slide; it automatically becomes a bullet point. Sub-slides are critical to visualizing your course.

I’ve used mind mapping applications as a way to plan my courses. These work great in the planning stages but that whole integration into PowerPoint becomes a multi-step process. At least it lets me throw a bunch of stuff at it, walk away, and come back to re-think and organize it. There are lots of different mind mapping tools out there but I won’t go into those here.

I’ll take another look at OmniOutliner for this purpose. Ideally, I’d like to see integration with an iPhone app too and I’m surprised Omni Group hasn’t done this already. It does sound like getting the outline into PowerPoint is a bit convoluted too though.

Tom, we’d love to have an Articulate solution for the Mac. You guys could do wonders in this space and decrease your dependency on Redmond breaking your software with their latest whims for PPT. The Mac crowd is HUNGRY for a premiere authoring tool and we’d love to see you guys do it. You’ve got rabid fans and if you combined that with Mac fanboys, the world better watch out.

Scott