Articulate Engage 09 review

The online presentations that Articulate Presenter 09 produces are impressive but the end viewer is essentially a passive recipient. The great thing about the web is that content doesn't have to be all one way traffic, and that's exactly Articulate Engage 09 is all about. It's aimed entirely at creating interactive online presentations.

It would be easy to make this an off-putting and complicated process, but Engage 09's strength is that it makes it almost embarrassingly straightforward. To begin creating your interactive slides all you need to do is choose from a range of ten built-in interaction types. These include common effects such as tabbed and accordion-style handling of multiple content containers and labelled graphics with pop-up content, as well as less common and more eye-catching options such as circle and pyramid diagrams. In addition, Engage 09 now offers a Community Interaction tab where you can download other interactive effects created by Flash-savvy members of the Articulate community.

You can then customise your selected interaction. Engage 09 provides a form-based environment where you can add text and other media to each content component, including the optional new Summary panel. Improvements here include support for bullet formatting and hanging indents, the ability to add hyperlinks or to create simple branching, and the same easy-to-use audio recorder and editor as seen in Presenter 09. You can also customize the colour scheme of your slide, though there's nothing like the presentational control that Quizmaker offers.

When you're happy with your slide content, you're ready to preview and then publish. Here the options are generally similar to those in Presenter 09 and include the ability to output to CD and LMS (learning management system) as well as to the Web. However, as Engage 09 can only produce one interaction at a time, there's no option to wrap your work in Articulate's excellent online player, which is disappointing.

Articulate Engage 09 makes it simple to produce high-impact and involving interactions, but with limited effects and controls plus the fact that you can only create and publish one interaction at a time, it only makes sense a partner to Presenter 09. We can't see many users choosing it on its own.

Author: Tom Arah