Heinemann Catalyst

[Wildebeaste]

Anybody know a fix to get Heinemann Catalyst (the CD version) Flash movies to play with IE7?

 

They'll play fine on IE6.

 

In IE 7 they just produce a blank HIPS Flash Viewer window.

 

I'm getting cross with it as all the staff laptops have IE7 now.

 

Any help gratefully received!

 

Ta.

[danIT]

Have you tried downloading the stand-alone installer and running as 'Administrator'? fixed a few bugs with staff laptops here?

[Wildebeaste]

Great! Some more software that sucks!

 

It won't work with IE7. So say their technical support.

 

They were taken 'by surprise' when Microsoft released IE7.

 

And there isn't a patch because the curriculum is changing and really, they just can't be bothered to fix it!

 

Looks like I'll have to roll back the whole science dept laptops to IE6.

 

Bugger.

[_Bat_]

How on earth did MS take them by surprise? There was loads of warning.

[itsciman]

Thank god i'm not the only one! How Heinemann can justify their pathetic response to people who've spent lots of money I don't know. Anyway, I open the files via program files/heinemann/catalyst/interactive presentation/documents (as I can access the C drive). Not great as I can't access via the menu screen, but at least I can view/use the flash presentations (as they're quite good). When I contacted Heinemann (last year) they said they'd send a free upgrade when they sorted the problem - nothing heard since !

Paul (science teacher who uses ICT quite a bit)

[SpuffMonkey]

Yes - its annoying us - in response to our complaints - they sent us this :

 

Further to your query regarding some incompatibility issues with our

Interactive Presentations software and Internet Explorer 7, please

accept our apologies for any inconvenience caused and find an update on

the situation below.

 

Our Interactive Presentations were first published in 2004, when we were

unaware of Internet Explorer 7, let alone any problems it would cause

for our software. Since we have become aware of the issues we have

investigated a solution to the current products but this has proved very

difficult. We have made the decision to publish new and improved

Interactive Presentations for 2008. As well as being fully IE7

compatible, these will include brand new content.

 

Unfortunately we will offer a full refund to only those customers who

have purchased the software since September 2006, after checking your

schools account I can confirm that the software was purchased in 2004.

 

As someone who has purchased our Interactive Presentations in the past

you will be among the first people we contact with further information,

as well as with a special offer if you choose to purchase the new

editions.

 

I would also like to take this opportunity to advise you of new science

publishing that we will be introducing next year, why not sign up for

our science e-newsletter to receive the latest information as soon as

it's available:

http://www.harcourt.co.uk/eNewsletters/eNewsLetter.aspx

 

If you have any further queries on this issue, please do not hesitate to

contact me, either by reply to this e-mail or by telephone on the number

listed below.

 

Yours sincerely,

 

 

ICT Support Team

Harcourt

[email protected]

Tel. (01865) 888108

Opening Hours: Mon-Fri 8:30-17:00 (except bank holidays)

http://www.harcourt.co.uk

 

 

Which pretty much is - tough!

[MrCoffee]

Being sad git that I am I tried to see if I could find a way around it myself.

 

Although I failed this might be worth knowing:

 

When you click on a link that leads to a flash file in IPS it tries to open a webpage with the filename of what its trying to open as an argument at the end of the URL (so it'd be something like flash_viewer.htm?src=myflashfile.swf for example).

 

Now I did try editing the flash_viewer.htm file (located in the documents directory in the year 7 version) to try and make it launch IE7 with this variable after it as an argument (the equivalent of going to the run bar and typing in: iexplore myflashfile.swf etc etc).

 

This was shot down in flames when I found that the variable that should've contained the name of the flash file actually contained nothing at all... *shrug* (if you're bored, you can just edit the file and use alert(variablename); to bring up a message box of what each variable may contain when you load/refresh the page... if you're bored =P)

 

Sooooooooo possibly the fastest workaround would be to replace the flash_viewer.htm file with a webpage that just brings up a list of direct links to each and every document. Is a long task, but then again you know how teachers can moan... =)

[contink]

Hmmm... daft question here but is this software basically a localhost file:// style website?

 

If so, perhaps the solution would be to install an apache webserver and use mod_rewrite to handle the variable to page properly...

 

This is of course a wild assed guess based on very little info at all... so take with a major salt store for a LA road clearing scheme

[MrCoffee]

rofl!

 

I don't think so!!

 

I did all this on a machine with a standard XP build, IIS was not installed. Not sure if the program installs it's own little webserver in the background - though I doubt it looking at the software =)

 

If we could decompile the application itself.... hmmm maybe a little bit of a legal grey area lol ^_^

[smichr]

Anybody know a fix to get Heinemann Catalyst (the CD version) Flash movies to play with IE7?

 

They'll play fine on IE6.

 

In IE 7 they just produce a blank HIPS Flash Viewer window.

 

I'm getting cross with it as all the staff laptops have IE7 now.

 

Any help gratefully received!

 

Ta.

 

I see that this is an old thread, but I just found the thread today when trying to answer the same question. If you are using VISTA, IE6 is not on options (so I've heard) so the following may be of use.

 

preface about the problem: IE is being given a URL with "?src=mediapath" where mediapath is the path to the media that corresponds to the link that was clicked. For some reason, everything after the "?" doesn't get passed through to IE7 so it looks like a request to "play nothing" and thus the blank screen.

 

alternate solution: Install Firefox 2 and after making it the default browser (so the clicks in the media browser get passed to Firefox rather than IE7) the file flash_viewer.htm in the "program files/Heinemann/HIPS/year*/Documents" folder must be changed in a text editor (like NotePad) as follows:

 

a line after

KeyValue = QueryString.substring(KeyValueStart,KeyValueEnd);

 

was inserted that reads KeyValue=KeyValue.substring(KeyValue.lastIndexOf("/")+1,KeyValue.length)

 

This line extracts just the file NAME rather than the whole path. Firefox doesn't like the whole path name in the swf viewer file (flash_container.htm) that receives the mediapath. *This one line fix should work as long as the media is always in the same folder as the flash_viewer.htm file.*

 

Everything works fine except sometimes it seems that the main window in Firefox covers over the media window--I just minimize it and then it seems to work fine for future clicks on media links.

 

P.S. At one point I tried to uninstall Firefox and then the links to media stopped working altogether, even when I tried (in VISTA) to get the default back to IE7. I found that there was a registry entry that was not purged after uninstalling Firefox, it is located under the computer/HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT entries for .htm AND .html where the Default reads "FirefoxHTML". That needs to be changed back to "htmlfile" in order for the links from the media browser of Heinemann's to call to IE7 again. (Of course, as has been found out in this thread, IE7 doesn't work, but I was worried about why IE7 wasn't recognized again after uninstalling and resetting file associations...perhaps this tidbit will be of use to someone else.)

 

Best regards,

Chris