FlyingAnt to serve Flash content from CD-ROM?

[JimB]

I'm developing an e-learning application using Articulate Presenter commercial software, which converts PowerPoint slidesets and linked multimedia (including several hours of FLV video files) to run with the Adobe Flash player.

I just discovered your FlyingAnt server while seeking a cross-platform way to put the contents of the web folder that Articulate Presenter creates, onto a multi-platform CD-ROM or DVD-ROM. This is necessary because Adobe Flash throws security errors when its browser-based player plug-in is used to access files on a CD or other local disc or drive ... even though the same files run fine when accessed via the Internet using various platforms and browsers. FlyingAnt looks like a very promising workaround that should let me burn a single CD or DVD with my content, to work seamlessly across Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms. (Articulate itself provides a Windows .exe file that gets around this issue a different way, avoiding a disc-based server in favor of a custom browser-free standalone Flash player "projector," but this isn't a solution for non-Windows users.)

Initial testing of my Articulate-created web folder with Flash player is looking good. However, before proceeding further down this development path, I wanted to post a message to this forum to ask if anyone's aware of any issues with going down this road.

Thanks to the Wrensoft development team for FlyingAnt. Looks like a great application!

Jim

[David]

We haven't heard of Articulate Presenter before. And no one has asked us about it.

I can't immediately see any reason why it wouldn't be OK with FlyingAnt. But the only way to be sure is to test it.

[JimB]

Thanks, it works exactly as I'd hoped!

To burn a test DVD, I pulled down the .zip version of FlyingAnt from your site, added my content into the webserver folder, and used the mkisofs_win32 package to create a multi-platform .iso with the rockridge settings your site recommends. As expected, the burned disc loads fine on both my Windows XP and MacBook machines. So in all, FlyingAnt turns out to be a great way to build hybrid CDs/DVDs that utilize Adobe Flash content, without triggering the security warnings that running such content off of removable discs without a localhost server does.

That could give FlyingAnt an additional customer base, if you're looking for one. Numerous forum posts on the Articulate Presenter site, for instance, complain of the inability to do just what FlyingAnt does; a similar workaround involving the Server2Go freeware is recommended, but Server2Go is Windows-only. I found your website when looking for a cross-platform solution.

By the way, I noticed in the FlyingAnt readme file that the demo isn't supposed to work from PowerPC Macs. However, I was able to run the burned iso's (yours and the one I created) from an old G3 laptop. Does the x86-only limitation apply just to the Zoom Search Engine -- which I could not get to work on the old machine -- rather than to FlyingAnt as well?

JimB

[David]

We support the old PowerPC Mac's, at least for the moment. Eventually they'll dwindle away to a tiny market share and we'll drop support.

The readme file might be wrong. Initially we only supported Intel CPUs, but later on we were able to add PowerPC support.

If we posted on the Articulate Presenter site, we might be accused on breaking some rule about self promotion. But if you would like to direct people to this post if they have questions, that would be great.