Removing client's ability to use play/pause button

Question

Hi all
I am keen to use Presenter to put together a language listening test for some clients. My clients want their students to not be able to pause the presentation so, say, they can't pause, translate word, pause, translate word and so on. In order to do this, I need to remove or lock the Pause/Play button that appears in the skin of a Presenter module.
I realise I can completely remove the Player bar by opening up the vconfig.xml file and changing the value next to <uishow name="playbar"> to false. This is a quick and dirty solution and may do the trick. However, I would like the students to still be able to see the time count down for each slide in the player bar. Why? Well, because my clients want their students to listen to an audio track, receive one minute's thinking time and then go on to answer a question about the track. The students should know how much time they still have available. This means somehow either removing the Play/Pause button or at least locking down its functionality.
I'm not a Flash wiz (though I do have it) but I don't mind making changes to a few codes here and there. I just need to know which file/s and which code.
Your thoughts/expertise would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance
Peta

Answer 1

Hi Peta,
You're right...you could hide the playbar by setting that value to "false", but as you have no doubt already seen, that modification eliminates everything, which won't totally solve your problem.
Since you have Flash, I'd recommend that you create a simple .swf file that will ultimately hide the Play/Pause button in the playbar area of Presenter content.  I'll be honest...I haven't "locked" the Play button, but that might be something to investigate IF what I'm proposing here doesn't do the trick for you.
So here we go....
In Flash, create a small stage area and on frame one in your timeline add the following:
this.onEnterFrame = function () {
_root.m_controlBar.m_playBtn._visible= 0;
Save the Flash file as "playBtnKill.fla" and then publish it.  Then head back to PowerPoint and add the swf to the first slide in a presentation using Presenter's Import Flash function.  Publish the content and the Play button should be gone!
Programming NOTE: because Presenter is set up for Flash Player 6/7/8, its best to code everything using Flash Player 6 / Actionscript 2.0 as the coding environment.
A couple of things to keep in mind about this:
First, by placing the swf file on the first slide of your PPT deck, the Play button will be affected for the entire duration of your presentation.  If you need it to show / hide / show /hide periodically throughout the deck, then you might want to think about how you want to handle the overall stucture of your course.  Meaning, that what might work is to kill off the Play button entirely, but use a PowerPoint graphic (that looks like a Play button) and then time that object to appear after a certain amount of time.  Of course, then you'd have to hyperlink the PPT object to the next slide in your deck so that folks will be given an opportunity to advance to the next slide.
Second, since your intention is to remove the Play button, you should probably leave the "Advance by user" feature set to "NO", otherwise you will ahve to provide some mechanism of navigating from slide to slide (as mentioned above).  At least this way, by the time you've reached the end of the audio for a slide, the presentation will automatically advance.
Hope that helps!
Rob
http://www.robrode.com/yabb/