Tuesday, January 07, 2014
Nice exception
A pretty good rule for digital stuff and digital services: You don't get what you pay for. In general there's very little correlation between cost and quality. Open source freeware and shareware is often better than high-cost "reputable" software and services.
Finally found a positive exception to the rule, in a rather specialized area.
SCORM is a semi-vacant jungle. Most of the activity has been locked inside "authoring systems", leaving the independent developer at loose ends. Lots of dead links, abandoned projects, websites untouched since 2003.
I've been trying all the free and open Scorm "testbeds" and "players". None of them work. The "player" from reload.ac.uk sort of halfway works, but doesn't seem to register results. I've been wrestling with this tree-jelly for many days, trying to determine if the problem was in my code or not. Felt like driving on ice with an opaque windshield and a crescent wrench turning a rounded-off steering shaft.
The positive exception is ScormCloud. Their minimal service, called "little", costs $75 and it's already worth every cent in my first day of usage. It's easy to upload your ZIPped package, the system understands everything, excellent live help is available, and it lets you know for damn sure what's happening. If there's a problem, it's on my end now. If I'm pretty sure that a function should work, it does work in ScormCloud. If I'm pretty sure that a function shouldn't work, it doesn't work in ScormCloud.
Ah. Blessed certainty! It's still icy driving, but now I can tell which of my turns leads into a skid!
¶ 7:40 AM 
