By now you’ve likely heard about the amazing new HTML5 capabilities in Adobe Captivate 6 – creating an ideal workflow for iPads and other OS devices. But wouldn’t it be cool if there were a mobile workflow for Adobe Presenter 8 too?

Well you’re in luck, because now you can easily download Adobe Presenter Mobile, a new app from the iTunes App store that plays your Presenter Flash files, right from the web on iPad and other iDevices. Yep!  It’s that simple. No need for special publishing, no need to build and deploy your own Apps on the iTunes store. You just publish  your eLearning project once, and the Presenter Flash files will play back from either a Flash plugin in any web browser, or from the Adobe Presenter Mobile App.  The best thing about it, is that you simply call up the URL on either the Desktop or the App, either way the same Presenter project file (SWF) is loaded and played.

Not only is this simplicity magical, thanks to the ubiquity of the solution you get unparalleled fidelity of your PowerPoint 2010 and lower files on conversion. Support for all kinds of animations, effects and triggers within your PowerPoint are all provided, including support for Microsoft PowerPoint Smart Art.

All of that alone would be pretty impressive, but add to it the fact that the Presenter Mobile App for iOS supports AICC tracking and reporting. Check around, you’ll find that the most of the competitors have no standards based support for tracking and reporting quiz data from mobile apps. Now with Adobe Presenter 8 and the Adobe Presenter Mobile App, you can create a seamless deployment that works on your iDevices, or even works identically on both your traditional desktops and laptops as well as your mobile devices.

Now you may be wondering, will my Learning Management System work with this AICC standards based tracking and reporting? The answer is most likely a resounding yes. There are two common standards supported by LMS’ in the industry today. Those are SCORM (more common in the US) and AICC (most common in Europe.) Fortunately in both the US and Europe, most learning management providers support both standards out of the box. This means that tracking and reporting to your LMS from an iPad running Presenter 8 content is a very realistic objective for the first time.
So the first question serious developers will have about this new app is ‘what’s supported?’ The answer is, nearly everything. Consider the table below which highlights the major supported features.

The big win here is support for modern PowerPoint.  That means all your Smart Art, all those animations, even levels of animation and triggers all will work as you’d expect them to.  If you need High Fidelity PowerPoint translation for the iPad, Adobe Presenter 8 and the Adobe Presenter Mobile App are the team that you’ve been looking for.  Just publish from Adobe Presenter 8 to the web, then download and install the Adobe Presenter Mobile App to your iPad.  Launch the Adobe Presenter Mobile App and surf to the URL of your published course. You’ll find that you’ve finally got really great parity for that PowerPoint deck on your iDevice.

You can add audio and video within Presenter to the deck in order to give your eLearning that extra sizzle.  You can even add simple tests using the Multiple Choice and True/False question types.  The Table of Contents you’d expect as well as the other aspects of skins are supported, so you’ll be able to wrap your presentations in an interactive navigation system.

Tracking and reporting those quizzes is also possible, because the engineering team has added support for both standard AICC reporting via your LMS as well as through Adobe Connect.  Most of the other settings and preferences you use to manage the project and identify the presenter are already supported as well.

Now, of course there are some things that just don’t work in the Mobile Player App at this time. I wanted to ensure that you all have an easy location to spot these and discuss how they might impact your design / authoring for mobile apps for the iPad etc. using Adobe Presenter 8, so have a look at the table below for an overview of features not yet fully supported in the Adobe Presenter 8 Mobile Player App.

Now while the Presenter project that plays back on your iPad is Flash, you need to remember that the mirror in a mirror effect is not supported at this time.  In other words, you can’t plop a Flash project (SWF) inside your Presenter Project and expect it to play on the iPad. While this technique is fully supported on the Desktop, it doesn’t yet work on the iPad.

If you want to add Audio or Video you’ll need to import them using Presenter, rather than using the PowerPoint import workflow. Also some of the more advanced features, like moving video to the Table of Contents tab are not yet supported.

Be sure to check the table above to better understand the current limits of AICC and quizzing support. You’ll also find that the non-standard playback options are not all supported at this time.

So now that you’ve got a pretty good idea of how it works, why not get started now. Just grab an iPad and follow this link to download the Adobe Presenter Mobile App from the iTunes store and check it out for yourself? As always, we look forward to your comments in the section below..