Re: Experiences with ToolBook II Assistant 7.0

[John Ballard <JohnBallard -at- DigitalCourseBooks -dot- com>]

Hello Suzanne,

I develop with Instructor instead of Assistant, but the only difference
is that with Instructor you can write custom scripts in Openscript.

A great resource for help with the export problems is the Toolb-l 
listserv:

http://www.biocom.arizona.edu/tbook/

If you are using Assistant, I wouldn't recommend deployment with Neuron 
for two reasons.

1. User's have to download the Neuron plug-in--which is a whopping
7.5MB.

2. The big advantage of the Neuron browser is that you can use
Instructor 
to write your own Openscript scripts and have the Neuron browser run
them.

Since you are using Assistant, your use of Openscript is limited to the 
pre-built widgets which have pre-made scripts.

One option might be to use the Action System and export your course as 
DHTML. This is a limited system, but it requires no plug-in for the
user. 
It's great for simple courses.

Java is not a bad option either, but I'm not sure of Assistant's 
capabilities for this. I believe the catalog specifies which widgets are 
Java-based and which are Openscript-based.

If it's a relatively simple course, you might want to look at using 
Macromedia's Dreamweaver with Coursebuilder extensions. It comes as a 
bundle and is not that expensive. It doesn't require the user to have a 
plug-in either.

http://www.macromedia.com/software/coursebuilder/


Hope this is helpful,

John Ballard
Interactive Course Developer
Digital CourseBooks
Houston, Texas

---------------------------------
>Suzanne Pyle wrote:
> 
> There seems to be quirks and little bugs that creep into final
> production for WBT applications using ToolBook --even the latest
> version. I'm wondering if you can share ways to avoid the pitfalls and
> recommend strategies to build applications that don't fall apart in
> production.
> 
> Specifically, I'm interesting in developing for a client a Web based
> training application using ToolBook Assistant II 7.0 that would either
> be distributed via their intranet using JRE, or the Neuron viewer. For a
> client, however, who hasn't experienced WBT, what would you recommend as
> a simple application that might not have all the bells and whistles, but
> at least wouldn't be full of error messages such as 'can't find .dll' or
> 'unable to load xxx'. By the way, I won't have access to Instructor---so
> I'll be relying totally on the Assistant.
> 
> Suzanne