After working on a little project created with fluid boxes I want to share some impressions and maybe present some problems. Correct me if I’m wrong anywhere in my descriptions.

I’m not going to complain about the problems, but just mention what lowered the overall good impression of this approach.

1. GROUPED OBJECTS AND “LAYER” OBJECTS.

The first thing that I don’t quite understand the purpose of is the inability to use grouped objects or to place png or jpg files on top of each other within a fluid box. I wonder if this is a conscious approach of the programming team or is it just an unsolved issue. This way or another, it limits the usefulness of fluid boxes a lot. For example, imagine I want to have a tank and a target marker in one of the fluid boxes. (If you are curious what kind of e-learning it is, I’m answering: teaching English Vocabulary for military personnel)

In a non-fluid box environment, it is very easy to achieve. I just drag two pngs from the project library and place one on top of another. But with fluid boxes, the only workaround I found is to go to a photoshop and make it one picture. Not a big deal, but if you have, say, 50 pictures it becomes a bit time consuming, and gets you out of a project for a while.  Probably nobody can help me much in this case.

2. STATE OBJECTS.

My idea was to use state objects to give the learners feedback after they answer a question. I wanted to make it more lively and inserted an object on custom states and animated  them (ones state as correct one as incorrect).   I wanted to use an advanced action to trigger the desired state (correct or incorrect) but if you insert anything on a state object, it automatically becomes unattached from the fluid box. So it works, but not within a fluid box What a pity !

3. MICRONAVIGATION

One of my favorite tricks while using text entry boxes is to apply the system variable cpCmdGoToFrame (going a few frames backward) to clear the text entry box without the necessity of reentering it. This way, as described in a few blogs here on this forum and elsewhere, you can give a user a chance to have a few attempts without leaving the slide. I found out that it doesn’t work in fluid boxes. The only workaround I found is to give feedback on another slide and return to the target slide again. But it is not so smooth as jumping from frame to frame.

So that’s what I think the missing features are. I hope someone will say, ‘hey, I checked this problem and it works on my computer’.  At least it will give me an incentive to start to investigate the proper solution.

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