Monthly Archives: February 2015

This week’s challenge in the Articulate eLearning Heroes Community is about teaching math concepts. That reminded me of the very first slider project I created during Storyline 2 beta testing. The point of this project was to learn about some of the new features in SL2; especially sliders, triggers to control the player buttons and motion path animations.

The idea was simple: recreate a basic ‘slide rule’, the gadget I used to do math with long before electronic calculators appeared. If you are too young to know what I mean, you can read up on slide rules here. I used a slide rule (the German word for it is ‘Rechenschieber’ :-)) in high school all the way up to university. They were essential for more complex math, and also worked nicely for sword fights during recess! I actually still have one.

When I first heard about the new slider feature in Storyline, I thought this would be a good test case. A slide rule has two moving parts, a sliding scale and a cursor/crosshair. Depending on the math operation that needs to be performed, e.g. getting the square root of some number or calculating a sinus value, you move one or both of these sliding parts.

Although I only had rather poor-quality scans, it wasn’t that difficult to recreate a basic slide rule that was accurate enough to illustrate how to use this gadget.

I later created lots of more ambitious slider projects, but this first attempt is not too shabby either! I toyed with the idea of adding a few more complex examples, but I had learned enough about sliders to leave it as is. It took me a while to dig up the old test file…

See here the published Storyline project.

This is my last blog post about Storyline sliders…ever…I promise! Since sliders were introduced in Storyline 2, I have used them to slide/move all sorts of things, from 3D models, large images, to videos. I feel like I covered this topic end-to-end, and then some.

Someone had sent me a link to an article this morning with ‘before & after images’ of the Berlin Wall. He asked if these types of sliders could be done with Storyline and, if yes, how difficult it would be to implement. “Of course this can be done”, I replied. Then I made myself a coffee and set out to recreate one of the sliders shown in the article. It couldn’t have been simpler. One of the images is simply the thumb of a slider that sits on top of the other image. Finito, done, stick a fork in it.

No triggers, no layers, no variable gymnastics… nothing. Just a single slide with an image and a slider with a transparent track and an image as the thumb. The hardest part was to extract the images from the article’s URL and to create the transparent drag handle for the slider.

Here is my first attempt.

I purposely switched the order of my images, just to prove that I’m not cheating by simply showing the original slider in a web object. My slider doesn’t exactly mimic the online version in that it moves the top image rather than revealing/hiding it as the slider is moved. But I proved my point and stuck to the ‘one-coffee’ time limit! I even had time to do a second, slightly different version.

Besides the fun factor and nice visual effect, this type of slider could be useful in training as well. Imagine a course about a digital camera with all kinds of filter settings. A slider could be used to show a picture with and without specific filters applied.

Edit 09/24/2015: For weekly eLearning Challenge #100, I stuck with the ‘Berlin Wall’ theme and just put a slightly different spin on it. I had seen a nice interactive map in an online newspaper and thought it would be easy enough to recreate. Nothing fancy here, just an image object with two states that is part of a group. The group is moved up/down/left/right with simple motion path animations and a bit of math.

Edit 09/29/2015: I went back and redid my original Before&After slider. I never really liked how my first two attempts had turned out, so here is a third version with an effect that (I think) is much closer to a Javascript/CSS-based slider. Instead of MOVING the Before image, it now REVEALS it, based on the slider position. Here is the .story file for download.

Edit 10/01/2015: And finally, here is a German version of the same slider. Here is the .story file for download.

I was looking for flight simulator information the other day and happened to see a great image showing the cockpit of an Airbus 350. The image was huge, 5617*3744 pixels. That made me wonder how an image of that size could be presented in a Storyline project, without loosing detail. My first thought was to use a Zoom region, but that would not allow to manually zoom in on a specific region of the picture. So, I wanted to see if I could find an easy way to both zoom AND pan a large picture.

It didn’t take very long to come up with one possible solution:

First, I had to tile the image into smaller segments (Storyline can handle images up to 2047*2047) and then size them correctly to create different zoom levels that show more and more detail. While each zoom level is on its own layer, they all re-use the same image tiles which cuts down on the file size. The entire interaction is contained in a single slide. The only challenge here was to figure out the dimensions and positions of the image tiles on each layer…nothing that couldn’t be handled with a bit of math!

For the Panning effect, I added motion path animations for the horizontal and vertical panning.

These animations are triggered by clicking simple navigation buttons. Variables and additional triggers with conditions are used to enable/disable the buttons once the panning reaches the edges of the image.

This type of zoom and/or panning could be used in Storyline projects to view large maps, detailed pictures, complex schematics, org charts  and much more.

Here is a test file I built with 8 zoom steps, from an overall view of the cockpit all the way up to a very detailed view of every switch, knob and dial. Note that the zooming doesn’t impact the image quality at all. The panning effect is only enabled on the lowest and highest zoom level. The panning steps on the lowest zoom level are fairly small, while at the top level (showing the fullsize image), each panning step moves  the image a significant distance.

I could have spend more time to finetune the positions and dimensions of the motion paths to make them completely symmetrical, but who has the time 🙂