On the 12th of February, I attended 2 London meetups: Articulate user meetup: Speeding up your eLearning workflows and Vyond community meetup: Connect with our team. It was the first time I’d attended these meetups, I met some interesting people and learn some new things!

It was a coincidence that both meetups occurred on the same day and both were relatively close to Farringdon station. I attended the Vyond meetup in the morning, then popped over to the Articulate meetup in the afternoon.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with both tools, Articulate is an elearning development tool, whilst Vyond is a video animation tool. I’ve been using Vyond for a little while now and will be posting a review soon.

The Vyond session was very similar to their introduction webinar, however they did show some new features that are being released soon. It’s disappointing that a lot of their new features are only available in the professional subscription – the most expensive subscription, but I guess a lot of software companies are moving to this type of subscription model now. It just irritates me because it feels like you only get the best features if you can pay for them and as a freelancer, money isn’t always at your disposal.

Vyond also did a short piece on how to embed their videos into Articulate Rise; both Vyond and Articulate work well together, but I think I prefer to embed videos into Storyline rather than Rise. The best bit about the meetup is that they asked people to share and talk through the videos they’d created, business and personal, so it was good to see what different people had created for different purposes.

In the afternoon I went to the Articulate meetup. Tom Kuhlmann also made an appearance! If you’re not familiar with Tom, check out his blog.

Similar to the Vyond meetup, Tom and the team demo’d some new features coming to Articulate 360. They also did a Q&A session where people could share some of the problems they’d encountered using Storyline and Rise. I loved seeing the new updates coming to Articulate – a new trigger menu and content library in Storyline and a new set of scenario blocks in Rise.

Overall it was a good day, I don’t think I’d attend another Vyond meetup, but I would definitely attend another Articulate meetup.