Hi Mike & John- Thanks for taking the time to share your concerns. We're really sorry and know what a significant impact this issue is having on so many people. We're doing our best to help resolve the issue. Unfortunately, content on CD is the hardest part of this to address. Although it does require some effort on the part of your customers,
here's a way to allow your users to switch between Flash Player 10 and Flash Player 9 to view your existing content.
If it's any consolation, Articulate customers are not the only group impacted by Flash 10. Companies like the BBC, Iomega, and CNN were all impacted, too (see
here and
here).
IE8: Presentations will work just fine in IE8. The deal with that is that as long as we were releasing a new version of the updater, we had our our entire engineering staff go through our entire codebase line by line to make sure Presenter 4 & 5 will be future-proof with future browsers and Flash players. We've invested a lot of time and money with Flash and browser vendors in an effort to future-proof our products.
Even though IE8 is in early beta and hasn't yet been released, presentations will currently work just fine in IE8. Depending on how Microsoft finalizes the implementation of IE8, though, there may be an issue with embedding in-slide Web Objects.
So we figured that since you'll be running our Flash Updater anyway, we thought we'd be proactive with regard to IE8, so regardless of how Microsoft decides to update it, you'll have no problem with embedded Web Objects -- if you use that feature in your courses.
By the way, the fact that our content does not exist as a single SWF is unrelated to this issue. In fact, the reason we create output the way we do is to optimize playback for users and to improve load times, especially for web-based content. Let's say you have a 100 MB course. If that existed in a single SWF file, your users would have to wait for the entire course to load before they could view it. With our output structure, users can begin viewing as soon as the first slide loads, and subsequent slides will preload.