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K-Flo
K-Flo
Participating Frequently
November 5, 2019
Question

Slide Content Rendering in Mobile Safari

  • November 5, 2019
  • 2 replies
  • 343 views

I'm running into some issues with mobile content and getting some interesting feedback from our LMS vendor (SumTotal). Their mobile app uses the same browser engine as mobile Safari. On some slides, some or all of the objects on the slide don't render. The content is pretty straightforward (i.e., shapes, images, audio) and no complex advanced actions or JS. Their analysis is telling them all the canvas elements from my master slides along with the slide objects are creating memory spikes. As with my slide content, the master slides are primarily shapes and text.

 

What's even more confusing is I build several courses from the same Captivate Template and many work seamlessly in their app, even with much more memory-intensive objects (e.g., high-res images, interactive video, etc.). They are still gathering data on the courses I have shared with them. I will say that running the same content in mobile Safari outside the app via SCORM cloud creates some similar issues, but the debugging logs don't really help me identify any problems. My content is all SCORM 1.2-compliant and published in HTML5. 

 

Has anyone seen similar issues with mobile Safari? I usually follow the axiom I read somewhere here not to believe the LMS vendor when the content is sound, but seeing it cause problems on an iPad in SCORM Cloud gives me pause. I've been using Captivate for 8+ years without these types of issues. I should also note that running the same content in Chrome on the iPad through SCORM Cloud presents no issues - same for running the content in any desktop browser.

 

More details:

Captivate 11.5.0.476

iPad Air 2

iOS 12.4.1 

SumTotal Mobile app - content is downloaded to the app for offline consumption

 

Thanks in advance for any insights!

This topic has been closed for replies.

2 replies

RodWard
Community Expert
RodWardCommunity Expert
Community Expert
November 7, 2019

If the SumTotal mobile app uses exactly the same version of the Safari browser present on mobile devices then everything should work the same. 

 

However, in the past many browsers that were licensed to third-party applications were not full versions of those browsers but 'sawn-off' versions that were missing some component and features found in the full-version browser.   (Captivate itself was at one time using a sawn-off version of Chrome browser for its own preview functionality.) The reasons for this came down to cost of the licensing as well as trying to minimise the filesize and footprint of the final app, while at the same time trying to maximise performance.

 

So, what I'm saying is that the browser in SumTotal's app might have the same underlying browser technology, but not necessarily every part of it required to handle the kind of e-learning Captivate is capable of producing.  It might be perfectly capable of rendering normal HTML5 code, but strong enough to handle the heavy lifting required by Canvas elements.  In such cases, those objects just don't get rendered, or get rendered too late to appear in the timeline.  

 

The clue I'm working off here is the fact that they are talking about 'memory spikes'.  That would tend to indicate the browser is finding the going too tough.  But in some of my current projects we are bulding very complex animations in Adobe Animate and pulling them into Captivate slides for display in mobile devices.  So, far we are not seeing any issues where the content objects in either the Captivate slide or the OAM animations within it are not appearing.

 

You mention that you have some similar issues when the same content is played in SCORM Cloud. In that case I would also be investigating whether or not your images are perhaps larger than they need to be.  Did you resize the images in an image editor so that they are only displaying at 100% of the final size, or did you just pull high-res images into Captivate and expect that it would optimise the image sizes?  If the images or graphics are too heavy, that might cause memory spikes but only where those graphics appear, whereas other slides don't have the same problem.

Lilybiri
Lilybiri
Legend
November 5, 2019

Please update to the most recent version which is 11.5.1.499 and try again....

    K-Flo
    K-FloAuthor
    Participating Frequently
    November 5, 2019

    Thank you - updating now and will follow up with the results.

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