Use the Presenter SDK to Navigate Between Multiple Courses

As Articulate Customer Support Engineer Brian Batt reminded the Twitter world yesterday, Presenter ’09 offers a Software Development Kit (SDK) for the Articulate Player. We’re often asked what you can do with the Articulate SDK.

Articulate MVP Brian Allen (brianosmi in the forums) recently shared a great example that illustrates how you can add functionality to your Articulate courses with the SDK. He needed to associate a series of individual Presenter courses in a single interface, but didn’t want each to have to launch separately.

Allow Brian to explain in more detail…

With this self-help course we were attempting to provide a deeper dive into the feature/functionality of this tool, and because the majority of the course was demo-driven, we were using the no sidebar method of inserting Flash video that Gabe outlined in this forum post.

The problem that this presented, though, was a lack of navigation options. We were not using the sidebar for navigation throughout the course, but we didn’t want the course to be strictly linear. We wanted to give the user the ability to only view the section that was applicable to him and also have the ability to jump around in the course.

View the LexisNexis PatentOptimizer Demo

Brian continues…

To solve this issue we built two sets of menus: Several “menu” slides, each one with an indicator of which section would be next for going through the course in a linear fashion, and a “master,” or generic menu slide, void of position indicators, which we hid at the end of the course for non-linear navigation.

We then created a Flash button titled “Main Menu,” and using the Articulate SDK we programmed this button to jump to the hidden menu slide when clicked. Lastly, to provide access to the master menu slide from any point within a section, we utilized the ability to add a custom Flash file to the “Powered by Articulate” panel, as shown below:

View the LexisNexis PatentOptimizer Demo

Brian concludes…

This enabled us to have a navigation option for the main menu always accessible from the user interface throughout the course, which allowed us to take advantage of maximum real estate for the demos.

Thanks to Brian for sharing this example of his work. Have an example you’d like to share? Let me know.

If you’re an Articulate Platinum Membership Plan customer and would like access to the Presenter SDK — or if you’re already using the SDK and want to connect with other Presenter SDK users — contact Articulate Support and ask for the SDK or access to the private SDK forum.

By the way, Engage ’09 also offers an SDK for developing Community Interactions.

And speaking of Twitter, you can follow Brian Batt, who’s been on fire this week with sharing Articulate tips, @articulatebrian, and me @articulategabe.