Adobe Captivate 5 comes bundled with a simple little tool called the Aggregator. The purpose of the tool is to connect together two or move Captivate movies into a shared table of contents. Here are a few random notes on the Aggregator that I have put together based on my recent experiences with it.
matthew
Matthew has over 20 years of experience as a user assistance and eLearning professional in the software industry, and is an Adobe Certified Instructor at Highlander. He is a qualified teacher (PGCE) and Certified Technical Trainer, and is also a Certified Instructor for MadCap Flare and WebWorks ePublisher.
Over the past 15 years, Matthew has trained more than 1000 authors how to develop online Help and eLearning. He has also been a popular speaker at conferences on eLearning and user assistance throughout the world since 1997, and has covered a diverse range of topics from context-sensitive Help design to electronic performance support systems. Matthew is an Adobe Certified Instructor and an Adobe Community Expert for both Captivate and RoboHelp.
Many authoring tools clearly distinguish between settings that affect the overall behaviour of the program (these are usually known as Preferences) and settings that affect only the current document or project (often known as Project Settings). In the user interface for Adobe Captivate 5.0, the differentiation between these two sets of settings is less clear, as they are merged together within a single dialog box called Preferences (accessible from the Edit menu). As a result, there is potentially some confusion about which settings are truly global, and which affect only the current project.
Last week I was at the annual WritersUA conference on software user assistance which took place this year in Long Beach, California. A very high proportion of the 360 conference attendees seemed to be Captivate users, which brought home to me what a popular product it has become these days.
A few weeks ago I touched on the issue of choosing an appropriate size (vertical and horizontal dimensions) for your Adobe Captivate project. This is important because the project is normally played back by users at 100% of this size and you want to ensure that users don’t have to use scroll bars to view the entire slide.
I’ve been using Captivate 5 fairly heavily for a while now. Because I had used previous versions for many years, I found the revamped interface in 5.0 took a bit of getting used to, but I am now really starting to appreciate some of its benefits. In particular, I like the fact that the properties for slides and objects are so easily accessible through the Properties Inspector.
Over time, however, I have picked up on a number of features within Captivate 4.0 that I seem to have lost with the upgrade to 5.0. There are workarounds for some of these, and others are fairly insignificant. But I thought that I would make a list of them as this information could be useful to anyone considering the migration from version 4.0 to 5.0:
Have you noticed that when you create Captivate simulations using Automatic Recording, the resulting movies seem to anticipate the users’ actions? For example, on a slide where the user is required to select a menu item, the item is already highlighted as if the mouse is being hovered over it?
Well, there’s now a fix for this issue in the latest update for Adobe Captivate 5 (see http://www.adobe.com/support/captivate/downloads.html). Somewhat bizarrely though, the fix is not applied automatically when you install the update — you have to make a manual edit to a .ini file within the Captivate installation folder. I fortunately discovered this piece of information because I happened to read the fine details of the readme file that accompanies the update.
Dec 222010
Recently I commented on the fact that the book Rapid Development with Adobe Captivate 5 for Windows devoted six pages to a technique for producing different sized versions of a Captivate project. That got me thinking about how important it really is to choose an appropriate width and height setting for Captivate projects.
Dec 132010
I recently purchased and read a new book on Adobe Captivate 5.0 called Rapid Development with Adobe Captivate 5 for Windows. The title was one of the things that drew me to it — it captures the spirit of the product (Captivate itself) very well.
It’s a strange book: in some ways it lives up to the title, in that it cuts to the chase and contains very little superfluous information that might bog you down. After a succinct summary of the rapid development workflow that the authors recommend, it gets straight into the practical business of how to record and create projects. It’s also packed with a large number of “professional tips and tricks” that are usefully listed (with page numbers) in the table of contents.
I’ve recently been getting into Advanced Actions in Captivate 5. The script editor is so much better than it was in Captivate 4. Advanced Actions are useful if you want to execute multiple actions (perhaps as a result of a user clicking a button), or if you need to execute one or more actions based on conditions. When you create Advanced Actions using the script editor, you are effectively writing a simple program. But the good news is that you don’t have to remember any programming commands or syntax — it’s all point and click.
One of the outstanding new features of Adobe Captivate 5 is its support for video. You are now able to import your video files (in almost any format) and synchronize the video action with the slides and objects in your Captivate project.
OK — video was already supported in Captivate 4.0, but there were many limitations: only Flash Video (.FLV) files were acceptable, it was very difficult to span multiple slides and synchronise reliably with individual objects, and the source video file lived outside of the Captivate project (rather than within the Library).
