Content not scaling properly on mobile devices when published with seamless play

jcraft6852

I have published a few titles with the Seamless Play box checked. In these titles I also have "Scale content to fill window" checked, and "Fit content to Width" unchecked. When viewing the published title on various mobile tablets (Samsung Galaxy and Kindle Fire) in LANDSCAPE orientation, the title extends too far below the visible dimensions of the tablet browser window. The same titles published without seamless play, and with the same other publish settings, DO scale properly -- the entire title fits within the dimensions of the tablet browser window.

Has anyone else come across this? Is it a bug, or is there something I could be doing wrong?

 

wheels

That sounds interesting.  Those settings should not affect mobile views, they are only for the desktop view (fill browser and fit width).

Mobile content should always scale to the width of the device.  The height may fit depending upon the page and device height. There should be no difference in page height when publishing with Seamless Play Publish or not.  I'll run this by the QA group to check.  If you have the name of a title you are experiencing this with we will be happy to take a look at it.

jcraft6852

Thanks for the reply Joe! I appreciate you looking into it with the QA group. I may be able to offer a few more details that would hopefully help. The way that the scaling worked on mobile devices prior to the recent update to 4.0 was great! At least from our perspective...We want our course pages to appear in full, even on mobile devices—we want the user to be able to see the entire screen without having to scroll down.

See the attachment titled pic1. This is a picture of one of our titles (named Agile Fundamentals) that was published with the prior version of LO (before 4.0) as it currently appears in our LMS (on a Samsung Galaxy Tablet in Landscape orientation).

You can see that there is extra space on the sides of the title (because the content is scaling to adjust to the height of the device in landscape mode.

The publish settings used are shown in the attachment titled "Publish Settings".

Again, that’s an existing course that was published prior to LO 4.0.

Now see the attachment titled pic2. I just now published the same title with the same publishing settings and uploaded it to the same LMS, and viewed in on the same Samsung tablet - and this is what it looks like.

I guess I was wrong in my post and the Seamless Play setting has nothing to do with the issue we are having. But hopefully you can see that something changed with the new LO 4.0 that is causing our courses to scale differently now on tablets. I know you say that those settings should not affect mobile views, but those settings did (in the prior LO version) affect mobile views the same way they affected desktop views. We’d really like to be able to have them working the way they used to.

Hopefully this helps illustrate what we are seeing! Thanks again for reaching out.

 

Jason

wheels

Thank you for this valuable input.  We have been looking into a similar issue that came in through support.  I will provide this to the software engineer who is looking at it and ask him to contact you with his findings.  Sorry for the delay in replying.  - Joe

 

jcraft6852

Thanks for the update Joe, I've been curious to hear your thoughts! This issue is somewhat urgent for us as we are delaying the release of a major title in hopes that the issue can be resolved. But we will continue to wait because it's important for us.  Feel free to have your software engineer call or email me if he has any results, questions, needs more details, etc. Thanks!

wheels

Hi Jason...

We had a discussion about this and definitely see where the code changed.  Previously we did apply the fit to window scaling even if we were in mobile.  There was a "fix" put in to not do this scaling for mobile.  This is because mobile already scales for the width and we did not envision this use case (where you want the height to always fit).

Thanks for showing us that we really should enable this feature for mobile.  We plan to do this in a near future release. In the meantime the engineer looking at this put together a library object that will allow this behavior in your title, I have attached it here.

-  Joe

jcraft6852

Thanks, although I tried the Library Object and it didn't seem to work. I put the library object at the top of our title, published to SCORM, selected "Scale content to fill window" and unchecked "Fit content to width". When previewing the title, I'm not seeing any change, it is not scaling to fit the height in LANDSCAPE orientation. I tested on a Samsung Galaxy running Chrome. Let me know if I may have put the library object in the wrong spot.

wheels

Hi Jason,  sorry about that.  I hadn't tested it....  We will put the fix into our 4.1.1 maintenance release coming in January.  See if this workaround is acceptable (it's a little clunky but we'll have a fix for this soon).

You can put an on show JavaScript action on the AU with a short delay that will scale the content. I'm attaching the action in a library object.

jcraft6852

That worked! Thanks for the temporary workaround. While not ideal with the delayed (quick) resize, it's definitely usable and a valuable and appreciated improvement for our users. We will look forward to the maintenance release in January, that will be good timing for a couple of our "bigger" title releases. I'll happily use your library object until then. Thanks again for the support.