My Book Review of "Learning Articulate Storyline"

Learning Articulate Storyline by Stephanie Harnett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Don’t think that just because you’ve been in an industry for 15 years or so and pride yourself on learning new tools all the time that you can’t learn something new! I’ve programmed and taught people how to use Storyline, and yet this book taught me things I had not yet found or had the opportunity to experience yet. Ms. Harnett does a great job in presenting information that individuals at any skill level can follow and learn from. The structure of presenting and explaining information and having “Follow along” exercises reinforces the content presented. The Appendix section covers a lot of more advanced features and handy guidelines to follow which makes for a handy reference tool. I would have appreciated a greater attention to advanced JavaScript techniques that can be used in conjunction with Storyline variables. So what are some of the cool things that you can learn from this book? How about typing in “=lorem()” into a text placeholder in order to have lorem ipsum text entered. Cool! Did you know that when you edit a character, you are only editing that specific instance of the character? I didn’t realize that. Speaking of characters, I learned about adding objects such as buttons, audio and video to the various “states” of those characters. I was always under this impression a “state” was simply a difference of the character not adding additional objects to the character. Cool! I’m purchasing this book for my team members – you should do the same.

View all my reviews

"Learning Articulate Storyline" is published by Packt Pub.  The link to this book on the publisher's website is http://www.packtpub.com/learning-articulate-storyline/book.  I downloaded the book for reading on my iPad. I used iBooks which was a great way to read and interact with the software on my laptop.  I was able to take notes, highlight sections, bookmark multiple pages for further review and leave my laptop screen free to work with Articulate Storyline.

What I'm reading now

I'm reading "Learning Articulate Storyline" by Stephanie Harnett.  Check it out at http://bit.ly/12I6Mih 

Reducing my electronic footprint

Looking for ways to reduce your electronic footprint?  I was.  My desk was a cluttered mess on multiple laptops, four large monitors, four power strips and more cords than you could count.  But I needed it all.  Mac for iOS development (xCode, iBooks Author, etc...) Windows for Lectora, MobiOne, Articulate Storyline, MS SQL and as a test platform.

I finally installed Parallels Virtual Machine with Windows 7 on it.  I then loaded Lectora, Articualte Storyline and Studio, Microsoft SQL Studio 2012, and MobiOne onto the Windows 7 instance.  I installed my Adobe CS6 suite of software onto the Mac as well as MySQL.  I am able to VPN into the home office with both Mac and Windows and share files between the two OS instances.  Very cool. 

Now, I can see my desk again. I removed one laptop, two external monitors, an armful of plugins and cords, several power strips, one extra headset and was finally able to move my printer to the other side of the room since it can now be fully wireless (the Windows laptop had to be USB connected to it).  I have room to spread out a bit and I have not reduced my capabilities to create awesome e- or m-Learning at all.  In face, I think its better because I can share files and test across plaforms with greater efficiency.