Master slides are a great new feature of Captivate 5.0. They are very similar to the Slide Master concept in Microsoft PowerPoint, and provide an easy way to add the same set of images to multiple slides. The way it works is this:
You create a master slide, and then add any required objects to it. The types of object you are allowed to add include text captions, images, highlight boxes, and rollovers. Unfortunately you are not able to add interactive objects such as click boxes or buttons.
Project templates can save you a lot of time and effort. They provide a flying start each time you begin a new project: if you create your new project from a template, this will typically save you the chore of setting up all the project settings and quiz preferences that you would otherwise need to enter manually for each project. The template may also provide a library full of useful images, and some basic slides with placeholders.
In the past, when looking for physics simulations in Actionscript 3, I used Box2DFlash. Although it worked very well, the problem was the documentation. It was terrible, and it would take me days to work something out and go through various examples, most of which didn’t apply to the latest version of Box2DFlash, but they were the only examples around.
Eventually I managed get a simple structure together, various boxes moving, bouncing and being able to be controlled by a mouse. I will eventually blog about the example I created as I think it will be a useful exercise for people usingBox2DFlash and for people who wish to see just what is possible in Actionscript 3.
With everyone talking about HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, etc I thought it would be a good idea to put together some simple cheat sheets regarding HTML5, CSS3 and JQuery.
They are by no means exhaustive – and they are not meant to be. They are just simple sheets indicating some basic elements, with a few examples thrown in. I plan to use these in future courses, and over time I might expand upon them, but I thought it would be useful for people to get a simple overview of what these topics are about.
Yes that’s right, you can now build iPhone apps with Flash using the functionality which was introduced in Flash CS5, following Apple’s announcement last night that it is relaxing the rules in it’s “App Store Review Guidelines”.
You might recall Adobe introduced this great new functionality earlier this year with Flash CS5, allowing Flash developers to build apps in Flash and then compile them quickly and easily to run on an iPhone or iPad as native apps. Apple then issued an announcement on almost the same day as the launch that it was changing it’s T’s and C’s so that apps compiled with 3rd party tools (such as Flash) wouldn’t be accepted into the iTunes Store. There was quite a bit of noise around this at the time as Apple had basically squashed the single biggest new features in Flash CS5 in one go.
My favourite new feature in Captivate 5 is the ability to save and apply object styles. These styles work in a similar way to paragraph styles in Microsoft Word and other text editors — they enable you to save a particular combination of formatting properties as a named style that can be applied to other items. Although you can use styles for any type of object in Captivate 5, I have found them most useful so far for text captions.