October 23, 2003
The saga of Breeze, Articulate & RoboPresenter
eHelp has a new product called RoboPresenter. They have also just been purchased by Macromedia.
Apparently, they bought some of this technology from a company called Articulate, who actually hired some talented friends of mine at an Atlanta company called Wiretree to build the player interface to begin with. This app was a finalist in the FlashForward 2003 festival. Wiretree always does really great work.
I'm not sure what Macromedia will do with RoboPresenter, since it appears to overlap with Breeze functionality. Maybe they'll use it for a new Breeze interface.
If MM does decide to market RoboPresenter, Articulate has plenty of other goodies to offer in the eLearning server tools department that eLearning folks should be sure to check out.
Posted by andy at October 23, 2003 05:18 PMI have been impressed with the Articulate Presenter desktop product, as a nice easy way to convert Powerpoint (which we have a lot of) to someone engaging training content. Our bottleneck is developers, and being able to offer a subject matter expert an easy way to product content is an appealing option. To be able to do it for several hundred $$ versus tens of thousands for a Breeze system is a great for us.
I am not quite sure if eHelp BOUGHT the technology outright, with the ownership of the code and rights to further develop, or if they just bought the rights to remarket Articulate's product. Articulate seems to be still rev'ing their product...
Posted by: Grant Cook at November 1, 2003 12:45 PMThis is just good player and nothin more.
You even can not change skin preferences and redesign the internal skin wiew.
Just realize that this product will be sold to thousands of customers and every presentation will have same 3 types of skins of course there is no extra programming knowledge needed for the developers to include more skins but the existent typea are extremely unconvenient. Especially bored and unusable the presenter info.
But i understand that there is only first steps.
I also wondered whether eHelp had bought the Articulate Presenter technology outright or merely licensed it, so I contacted Adam Schwartz, the CEO of Articulate Global. He assured me that the latter was the case, or, as he put it, eHelp had licensed a "snapshot" of the code as it was at one point. This means that RoboPresenter and Articulate Presenter, though nearly identical now, may increasingly diverge as time goes on. Which you choose will depend on which has the features you want -- or at least which has them better implemented.
Because of RoboPresenter's more than passing similarity to Breeze (and the fact that it costs about 1/50 of a one-year base-model ASP Breeze contract), Macromedia may cease its development or merge its features into Breeze (as suggested above). This would effectively kill RoboPresenter as a viable product.
Or Macromedia could continue developing it and, as it has done with other acquired products, increase the price significantly. But it might also actually release an API or SDK to enable customization.
In its favor, Articulate Global is, so far, independent of Macromedia and therefore has a good reason to continue development of Articulate Presenter. The downside is that it doesn't have the development staff or budget that Macromedia has. But then again, Articulate has only two products to spend the R&D dollars on. Unfortunately, relying on only two products for revenue can be a problem -- I hope it doesn't endanger the long-term health of the company.
Posted by: tzedekh at November 10, 2003 12:48 PMArticulate recently released Articulate Presenter 4.0, which offers a number of great new features, including customizable templates, editable player buttons, improved performance, and more.
We're continuing to make Articulate Presenter even better, and we always invite feedback.
We have also launched a new blog, Word of Mouth, where we'll post the latest announcements, tips 'n tricks, etc.
Sincerely,
Gabe Anderson
Director of Customer Support
Articulate