Since Presenter Community Skins debuted in November 2009 and Dave Mozealous shared how he created a custom Articulate Presenter skin in less than an hour, we’ve seen lots of community members step forward and create more skins for the community.
Below are eight new custom player skins we’ve seen, both free and for-fee:
eLearning Brothers
The eLearning Brothers offer a number of unique player skins for sale, including the below, called Gizmo, which features a navigation menu that slides up from the lower left-hand corner:
Logic Swing
Logic Swing created the below custom player that it’s giving away upon request (the branded version is free; an unbranded version is available for $299). The skin features some nice custom graphics and improved real estate to maximize the area you can leverage for inserting third-party SWF files (up to 555×980 without affecting player controls):
Tony Lowe
Tony Lowe has another unique player skin (available for free download) that incorporates a reflection of each slide in the lower portion of the player:
Tony had this to say about his experience creating the skin:
“My articulate skin story goes back to the first European Articulate user conference in May 2009, when I saw Kineo present and had to scrape my jaw off the floor after seeing what they were doing. Very humbling. I knew then I had to get to grips with creating skins.
“Since then I have focused on developing and delivering training to other would-be skin developers and offering a custom skin development service for clients. I have delivered this training face-to-face in the UK and online to clients outside the UK. The main aspects of this training are an introduction to the main concepts, source files for a comprehensive generic skin and online support while the skin developer gets to grips with creating their own skins.
“The source file allows my clients to avoid having to create and code the main skin functionality so they can focus immediately on achieving their desired look and feel. This source file includes pop-up menus with hide and reveal sub-slides, slide time line controls, volume controls, pop-up presenter panels, and more. If it doesn’t include something the client wants, I can add it.”
Webducate & Dave Moxon
Articulate’s own Dave Moxon leveraged a simple player created by Webducate’s Tony Lowe to build this compelling chromeless iPad demo in PowerPoint and Articulate Presenter:
You can download the chromeless player here.
Learn Nuggets
Kevin Thorn of LearnNuggets wrote a whole blog entry (and Screenr tutorial) outlining his experience creating his first custom skin:
James Kingsley
Articulate MVP James Kingsley addressed the desire for Articulate Presenter content to play on mobile devices that don’t support Flash, such as the iPhone and iPad, by creating a low-bandwidth HTML5 custom player (available for $25):
James has also created a new customizable skin that allows you to add your own graphics, such as “next” and “previous” buttons, to it — with little effort.
Webucate Us
Cyrelle Gerson of Webucate Us has created a simple (free) custom skin with borders removed, so that you can work with your content starting from a blank slate. (The company, incidentally, also has embedded Articulate Presenter content on the main page of its website.).Here’s a screencast about it:
Jade Kelsall
Jade Kelsall created a minimalist skin as part of an Articulate challenge for a European Articulate user group gathering. Here’s a screenshot of that original presentation with the custom skin:
Since then, Jade’s updated it with a social media banner and some controls at the bottom.
You can download Jade’s skin here.
Jade said the following about her experience:
“I orginally created this skin for the Articulate Challenge, which was a part of the 2010 European Articulate Conference in Leeds. Conference participants were invited to create a course from the provided content on social media in education; I demonstrated my course at the conference, and was rewarded for my efforts with an Articulate hat.
“Since then, I’ve improved the skin slightly by getting some better quality images for the header bar, and tidying up the bottom bar by having the back arrow hidden on the first slide, and the forward arrow hidden on the last slide.
“Many thanks to Tony Lowe for getting me started on developing skins; hopefully this will be my first of many!”
It’s great to see so much creativity among Articulate community members, and we look forward to seeing what you create next.
Wow it is awesome to see how the community really getting into this part of Articulate!
What’s next?
onEnterFrame | Posted at 04:32 pm on June 22nd, 2010 | #