Getting Out Of The Mould
If you had a chance to see Tom Kuhlmann’s demo in one of his recent articles, you’ll notice how he managed to make a regular PowerPoint file look anything but PowerPoint. One way he managed to do that was to remove any signs of the Articulate player.
You can customize the player via the Player Templates tool in Articulate Presenter and make the player black and the HTML background black. All we see is the PowerPoint slide. This works because the black lines of the player which cannot be removed merge with the black HTML and slide backgrounds making it look like just the slide is showing.
I used this method when I started creating e-learning courses. It worked well but it did give an overall dark (ie. black) feel to them all. Seeing Tom’s demo prompted me to consider building an Articulate skin which would hide the entire player without buttons or navigation. The skin would be white. I asked Webducate’s Tony Lowe if he would be kind enough to oblige and he did. This what you get:
iPad Simulation
Click on some of the icons and click on the home button to the right of the display to come back to the home page.
Hiding PowerPoint
If you didn’t notice, the iPad simulation is just an Articulate presentation without the player. It launched when the page was launched and is embedded via an iFrame. What’s great about this skin is that it really allows you to think outside the regular PowerPoint mode or indeed the e-learning mindset. You can create your Flash interactions very easily with Articulate Presenter and insert them into your web page without the user even knowing they are going through a PowerPoint set of slides. You can create video or audio jukeboxes. And you can create interactive simulations like the one above.
How Do You Do It?
- The iPad simulation was created pretty easily using screenshots from the iPad itself (Home button and Sleep button at the same time) each in their own slide in PowerPoint. I placed invisible hotspots over the buttons to hyperlink from one screenshot to the other. The videos were placed on top of the iPad screenshot.
- To remove the Articulate player, I used this Articulate skin package prepared by Tony Lowe which you can download here for free.
You should be downloading a file called webducateWhiteNoButton.artpkg. If you find you are downloading a zip file instead, you can try downloading this file instead (webducateWhiteNoButton.zip) and unzip that to find the correct artpkg file.
- Once installed, choose the skin from the list of available templates.
- Now prepare your presentation. You’ll probably want to make your slides have a white background so that they merge well with the white skin.
- Now publish and enjoy!
You may need to close PowerPoint first before running the package.
IMPORTANT: The skin works with the No Sidebar view of Articulate Presenter only.
Note that it will not work in preview mode so be sure to publish to see your final output
Great post and awesome iPad imulation! Unfortunately at my company we are stuck in the box of a corporate template for our eLearning.. but this gives me some idea’s. Thanks Dave!
Thanks for supplying the files. I’d love to play around with this feature.
When I download the package it is in ZIP form. When I unzip, I get a couple of .swf files and xml files. How do I install them so they act like a custom skin?
Hi Cathy, as Dave Mozealous says (no we are not the same Dave), some browsers kind of change the tag from artpkg to zip which then makes it difficult to install properly. I actually found it worked well with Chrome (the browser I normally use), and with Firefox but not with Internet Explorer 8 so I am sorry about that. You can either do as Dave Mozealous suggests and rename the tag (assuming they are visible in your system) or else download this file which is in zip format by design and then upzip that to find the artpkg file you need to install. Hope that helps.
Hi Dave and community
I loooove the ipad skin – fantastic idea and am looking to use this together with the “Christmas Tree” Powerpoint Template. I can’t seem to get the ipad to appear though. I have taken the following steps – can someone let me know where I have gone wrong? I really want this skin :)!
1. I have downloaded the “webducateWhiteNoButtons file 2. The template appears in the Presentation Template and in view mode I have “No sidebar view (Starting View” as recommended
3. But when I preview or publish I only see either the normal articulate skin, or I see the slide with a black or white border – no ipad.
Hi Michelle, Glad you liked the skin! It’s actually just a white or blank skin which hides the Articulate player interface leaving the PowerPoint slide to appear by itself. It is not an iPad skin. What you see of the iPad is actually a collection of screenshots that have been placed on the PowerPoint slides, and I have placed other content on top to make it appear as if it is playing on an iPad. Hope that helps.
Really cool demo, Dave! Nice work!
Dave this is really cool. I tried out the template and while the navigation buttons are gone, I’m still seeing the Articluate frame, what did I miss?
Hi Dave – great post! I tried it out and I got the same thing as Shawn (navigation buttons are gone, but I still see the Articulate frame). Anything I might have missed?
Hi Denis and Shawn, Thanks for your comments. I have not had time yet to test what you might have done to get that outline but my guess at the moment is that you are not publishing to No Sidebar view. You need to make sure that all your slides in No Sidebar view (you take out the Slide View and the Standard View in the Player Template -> Layout tab) and make sure you don’t reference any changes in the Slide Properties. Let me know if that does the trick.
Hey Cathy,
When you download the zip, rename it to have a .artpkg file extension (some browsers like Chrome change the extension, and this is causing the problem). Once the file is a .artpkg file you can double click to install it.
Hope this helps.
Dave Mozealous
Hey Dave,
Great post! This is another great example of thinking outside the box…er, um…outside the “elearning template” :) And big kudos to Tony for sharing the skin!
This is fantastic! I’m looking forward to using this to create system simulations for functions that we can’t otherwise replicate. Thank you for sharing…
Finally – an Ipad that plays flash :)
Nice work Dave.
I’ve been helping Denise with her problem with the skin and I think we have found a solution. It is hard to say what is causing the problem but it is something to do with the downloaded artpkg file that only seems to affect some people. Feel free to email me for a copy of the artpkg if you are affected in this way and I will email you a copy which seems to work.
tony@webducate.net
Hi Tony,
I seem to be having the same problem as Denise – that is I’m still getting the Articulate outline. Is there any way I can get a copy of the new artpkg file?
Unfortunately our email server blocks the vast majority of emails with attachments, so if possible a link to a place that I can download it from would be great.
Thanks!!
Hi Dave, I checked what you recommended and was still seeing the same result. I emailed Tony to see if I could get a newer copy of the template.
Hi Shawn, thanks for keeping me in the loop. Is there any chance you can send me a screenshot of what you are seeing? Can you also check your version of Flash for me? I tested on 10,0,32,18 and then updated to the latest version 10,4,45,2 and it worked fine on both. Also be sure that you publishing your output and not just previewing. It won’t work in preview mode. Thanks
[...] Removing the Articulate Player…Completely [...]
Very nice!
Thank you for sharing.
Hi Dave,
Tony followed through like a champion and sent me a new copy of the template and it works like a champ. Thanks for all of your great tips/tricks.
[...] own Dave Moxon leveraged a simple player created by Webducate’s Tony Lowe to build this compelling chromeless iPad demo in PowerPoint and Articulate [...]
It would be great it Articulate could lead the way with bringing eLearning into the HTML 5 era. Articulate could be helping modify HTML5 so that it does what it needs to to make interactive learning, and modifying Aritculate so that it fits with that…
Well, this gem has turned out to be quite prophetic. And not much more than a year past the post!
Hi …
Like Cathy, I’d love to try this out – but I get the same problems – even when I download the zip provided by daveperso.
I can unzip successfully, but when I double click the .artpkg file I get a message indicating ‘there was an error installing the package’.
Any ideas? (I closed PowerPoint before trying to install)
I’m running Articulate 09 and PowerPoint 2007.
Thanks,
Martin
Hi Martin,
I’ll send you the artpkg by email. That seems to have done the trick for a few others with the same problem.
This is simply awesome. Will PowerPoint be replaced someday?
Hi Dave,
First of all sorry for posting my comment over here.
But I need a favour from you as I found your site extremely helpful in many degrees related to articulate.
Dave what if I want to show my navigation bar in drop down manner at horizontal position in my articulate presentation.
And can I show attachment tab in full view mode of presentation.
Any thoughts ?
Your help would be highly appreciable.
Thanks
Hi Mayank, I can’t see an easy way of doing that without using the Articulate SDK and some Flash. You might want to contact one of the skin creators on this page to see if that could help you.
Dave, thanks for sharing this, but the link to the second file doesn’t work for me either. Could you send me the file?
Dave, nevermind, i simply changed the zip extension to artpkg and it works perfectly, thanks for sharing!
Are the players still availalble? None of the links work for me. I get a zip file that does not contain the .artpkg file or i get a 404 error message.
Hi Owen,
Some people have been having trouble downloading the players. I have changed one of the links and tested both and they work for me. The 404 message should disappear at least. Let me know if you still have problems.
I love the skin, but what I’m trying to achieve really is black with no buttons.
I’ve played with the color scheme for the template, but I’ve not been able to turn everything black. I set the slide background and the html background to black, but there is still a large white border between the slide and the html background.
What can I do?
[...] drew inspiration from Dave Moxon’s Removing the Articulate Player…Completely article, and decided to publish using the custom player skin that hid all of Presenter’s [...]
Can I use this skin for the Articulate “Storyline Player ?”
Hi Arvind, no this skin won’t work for the Storyline player but you don’t really need to use it. In Storyline, you can remove all the player controls and make everything white effectively getting the same effect as you see here. It might be an idea to explore all the player template options in Storyline!