No, no — not Plato. Plato Learning, Inc. They’re the company that provides the online program that we’re using in my math class.
It’s not that the program is bad — in fact, it seems to be simple enough (I’ve only gone through the introductory “this is how it works” section so far), and their website lists a number of success stories and awards for the program. It’s simply that after going through the first section and poking around at the CDs, I can’t find any good reason why the software is Windows-specific.
Basically, the entire setup is HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PDF, and Flash, with a Windows shell that it runs inside. To start a session, you go to the PIM site, choose your school, and then you’re presented with the options to do a lesson or check your progress. When you choose to do a lesson, a small nscc.iss file is downloaded. That file is actually a minimal text file with five small variables:
[Site Info]
Site=NSCC
SID=SD1
externalserver=isswebdb.academic.com
Server=isswebdb.academic.com
PORT=1521
Windows has .iss files registered to the shell program, which then connects to their servers using the information passed on inside the .iss file. After a quick logon/password check, the shell program then proceeds to run the courses off of the provided course CDs.
As best I can tell, the shell program needs to do four things:
- Read the data in the
.issfile, - Connect to the Plato servers to perform a login/password check,
- Connect to the Plato servers to transmit scores and progress status,
- Act as a mini-browser to display the HTML, JavaScript, and Flash files stored locally (I’m guessing PDF files are passed off to Acrobat Reader, though I’m not entirely sure yet).
In other words, absolutely nothing that requires Windows. The only thing preventing them from being able to offer the home-based services to Mac users as well as Windows users is the lack of a Mac-based shell. While I’m no programmer, I really have to wonder about just how complex something like that really would be…I’m guessing not terribly. Certainly something a major educational software company should be able to handle hiring a Mac programmer to do.
Ah, well. Macs are still the minority, so things like this aren’t exactly a surprise. Annoying and frustrating, yes — but not a surprise.
Amusingly, figuring all this out gained me a small “star moment” in class today. While about half the computers in the classroom were handling the nscc.iss file correctly (downloading it and triggering the launch of the shell), the other half apparently didn’t have .iss registered as a known file type under Windows. For those students, clicking the ‘do a lesson’ link resulted in nothing but a standard Windows “I don’t know what this file is. Open it or save it?” dialog box. Saving it, of course, did nothing, and trying to open it just presented the “pick a program” dialog box. Neither the students nor Ms. DeSoto had any clue what was going wrong, or how to get around it.
While my computer had worked as it should, I was watching the guy next to me fumble his way through trying to get things to work correctly. When the “pick a program” dialog popped up he started scrolling through it, and I noticed a program called issstub.exe pass by. Figuring that there was a good chance that issstub might handle .iss files, I told him to give that one a try — and as soon as he chose that one, the shell program opened right up, connected, and was ready to go. I pointed this out to another couple students who were having the same problem wile Ms. DeSoto watched, and then she passed the process on to the rest of the class. Success!
As the hour ended, I was packing up my bag when she walked by and patted me on the shoulder. “Thanks so much for finding that — you saved my day!”
Hey. Day number two, and I’m already sucking up to the teachers. ;)
“I Was Born to Love You” by Queen from the album Made In Heaven (1995, 4:49).
Just don’t get to Evangalistic about cross platform support; Plato Learning Inc. probably have their reasons for not supporting Mac OS X, or Windows machines running Firefox or Opera.
I got caught up in WordPerfect vs Word evangelism when I was at TAFE and as a result the only Assignments the Instructor could read were the PDFs I created using DocBook SGML>LaTeX>PostScript>PDF. (I couldn’t afford Acrobat and couldn’t stand using Word- It’s just so clunky!)
Hm. I wonder if I could whip something up. I know I certainly could if I had access to the files involved (on the CD).
Plato’s case sounds like an easy fix, but a lazy/unobservant company. WWU Physics students deal with having to pay for what amounts to beta services to answer physics questions online. It has issues with Safari and even a few with Firefox.
On the .doc deal: I asked a few profs to start distributing things in RTF and they gladly did. None of them were using WordArt or junk like that, so they didn’t have special formatting needs and RTFs work fine cross-platform and cross-application. Maybe an easier middle ground than PDFs.
on the converse, Robert, I’d suggest occams razor applies, and the answer is simple economics. It’s far cheaper to only have to train your helpdesk to answer windows/ie questions, rather than multiple browsers and os’s. User Support is the number one cost of a service organization like this — or at least, the organizations I’ve worked for.
Mind you, the developers time can be capitalized, like the computer hardware that run the website. That means that it looks different on the books. Support is purely an expense, and can’t be written off, depreciated, or tax-deducted in any other way, like capital expenses can be.
As an aside, Mozilla-firefox can change its user-agent string to look like MSIE on Windows. You might give that a try, and see if the site really does work as you think it should. If it really is just a CSS site, then you’re in like flynn. However, I’ll bet there are things like iframes that will bonk your browser when you aren’t looking.
It’s really far easier to just use Wine to run MSIE on your unix box for those 5 websites that need it.
Hmmmm… the 1521 port and the SID line look suspiciously to me like a sort of Oracle client configuration. 1521 is the default TCP/IP port for the Oracle listener, and SID identifies the database to connect to (and “webdb” reminds me of the Oracle Web/DB product). Not that this automatically means that a Windows PC is required, but it is interesting nevertheless.
Eeeeh — I’m not really going to spend a ton of time seeing if I can hack a way to get it working on my Mac, tempting though it is. Firstly, between school and work I just don’t have a ton of time to play with that; secondly, they do give me that hour a day of classroom time for using the software on-campus. I might as well use it!
Besides, as CPS pointed out, there may be more bits inside the shell program that I’m not seeing or just haven’t encountered yet that do restrict it to Windows (IE-specific scripting commands, perhaps). I’m still not convinced that there’s a good reason not to support the Mac, but I’ll go with it. Just had to grumble a bit. ;)
Remember summer arts camp at APU? You had an hour a day after the regular time to use the PLATO program in the computer lab. I think all you recall of that time, though, is the old fashioned elevator (which was just replaced a couple years ago) with the gate — like your apartment had — and if someone forgot to close the door you had to run down and close the gate so you could use the elevator. A distinctly silly proposition!
At that time Apple was the computer of choice for education and PCs for business. I think the Plato program was on an Apple — this was a long time ago!
Anyhow, aren’t you supposed to be doing math in that hour rather than investigating the configuration of the computer!! Nag, Nag, There she goes again!
Love to you — Mum
It sounds as if it could be done purely in-browser, which would be the ideal way to go. The need to support multiple platforms would pretty much go away.