Letexa Blog

Small changes in the Flash of the “About Email” courselet posted yesterday for more operational consistency, no change in contents. Used the same courselet framework for also extracting About News and About RSS from the ill-fated large Thunderbird course. This road looks promising, I’ll keep riding it… i.e. I’ll release such small pieces and stop working on the large one - the amount of course contents I am going to create will be the same but it will be much more shareable, manageable, viewable etc.

Mörre

I added some text to the About section.

I asked on the Mozilla Thunderbird forum what they thought about course #1, about Thunderbird. I got the promise to get a link to this site once the course is ready.

Also, the responses and writing the additional About text got me thinking - my mega-package of a course (once ready it would/will be quite big) is not exactly what I’m propagating. Shouldn’t I create lots of small pieces and make them available, and then create a course out of the pieces, rather than one giant Flash file, hard reuse?

So I’ve started taking the course apart, and the first result is a new “courselet” (also a new word, I use it for something that’s too small to be a called a course) “About Email”.

From now on I’ll create many small pieces, and only when all pieces are ready I assemble them into a full course - which can be done via HTML - or in a giant Flash file, as I started doing. Also, the pieces can be used for anything else, for other courses for example. A courselet about RSS in general (another part of that big Thunderbird course), for example, can be used in more courses than one about Thunderbird!

Mörre

Today I uploaded an updated version of course #1 for Mozilla Thunderbird. Now section “Basic Setup” has been updated and now has contents in section Background Information “About News”, not just in “About Email”. All others are still empty. Please note that navigation within these two audio-supported parts still does not work. You may scroll within the audio, but the screenplay won’t be in sync then, unless you get to the next audio “cue point event” when the screen will be synchronized with what’s playing again. Working on it - only a simple matter…

Update 8 July: Small design updates to this first course (e.g. to the nav buttons, make them simpler); volume bar works now.

Update 9 July: Play controls work (seeking, forward, back); Added a “return” button to the still empty menu points (only “Installation” and “Basic Setup” of the Thunderbird course have contents thus far), until now you where stuck if you navigated there.

Update 10 July (very late 9 July, really): Added “Basic Configuration” -> “Background Information” -> “About RSS” section. I found navigation does not work relliably - because I use gotoAndPlay (Actionscript 2.0 code). With gotoAndStop it would work. This is because I have a frame-by-frame setup, with stepping forward triggered by the video/audio file (”cuepoints”). I found if I add one more (non-key)frame for each of those frames it works, have to do that or find another workaround. Flash is full of surprises and unexpected behavior…

Update 10 July: Now navigation should *really* work.

Although it seems nothing has been going on since January, that’s not true! I kept silent on the website only because I switched to a different technology - all Flash - and had to start from scratch programming a player framework to put the course into.

Yesterday I put the first course online. It is still under development, but this is the first time I have something more than this blog to show!

Under http://letexa.com/courses/1/ you can find this course. As of posting time, only the first two items “Installation” and “Basic Configuration” have contents. The more interesting one - with sound already - is under “Basic Configuration” -> “Background Information”. The playback controls (forward/back/seek) don’t fully work yet, but you can use the seekbar to go to the end of the audio to go to the end if you don’t want to wait the full 6 minutes!
Development is progressing much faster now, since I finally have the framework in place. I decided to go all-Flash - for many reasons. In a much later stage I would like to have course contents and course behavior separated (as I said in previous posts here, read there), and then any player could be programmed to show the actual course. This way we’d be independent of Flash, but for know that’s the only really viable x-platform multimedia technology.

Mörre