Mouse positioning and movement around FMR slides

 Captivate  No Responses »
Jan 082012
 

When you are recording (in either manual or automatic mode) and you perform a drag-and-drop operation, Captivate creates a special Full Motion Recording (FMR) slide.  This slide has a small black camcorder icon (I actually think it looks more like a bugle!) beneath it in the resulting Filmstrip.  Instead of a static screenshot, its background is an animation that shows the drag-and-drop action.

In Captivate 5.x, you may notice some rather strange things happening to the mouse position and movement within the two slides that precede and follow the FMR slide:  Read more...

Overriding Styles in Adobe Captivate projects

 Captivate  No Responses »
Dec 222011
 

Object styles provide an extremely useful way of easily applying a consistent set of formatting properties to objects in Adobe Captivate 5.x. Styles include settings that affect the appearance of the object (colour, text alignment, caption type, etc.). They do not include size or position settings, callout styles, or an other settings relating to the behaviour of the object (such as Success Action). Thus, there are no styles for Click Boxes (because they have no appearance — by definition they are invisible).  Read more...

 Posted by on December 22, 2011

Captivate 5.5 movies can now be embedded in Adobe Presenter modules

 Captivate  No Responses »
Nov 182011
 

Adobe recently released a new patch (7.07) for their Presenter product, which is bundled alongside Captivate within the Adobe eLearning Suite.  Presenter is an add-in for PowerPoint that enables you to add audio, video, and quiz questions into PowerPoint slide shows, and to publish them in Flash format for deployment to a web server or LMS.

The significance of the new patch for Captivate developers is that, for the first time, Presenter supports ActionScript 3 — which means that you can now embed a Captivate 5.x movie (.swf file) within a Presenter slide.  If you tried doing this with the version of Presenter (7.06) that is included within the Adobe eLearning Suite 2.5, the result would have been a rather disconcerting flashing screen accompanied by a rapid clicking sound.  Read more...

Using Acrobat.com for posting Quiz Results

 Captivate  No Responses »
Oct 172011
 

One of the most common questions I receive about Captivate’s Quiz capabilities is whether it is possible to gather scores from users without the use of a Learning Management System (LMS).  Until version 5 of Captivate, I always used to answer “no”.  This is because the email option (intended as a solution where an LMS is not available) is unreliable, and is open to learners editing their scores before sending them.  Read more...

Does a demonstration have to include movement?

 Captivate  No Responses »
Sep 262011
 

I was at the Technical Communication UK (TCUK) conference near Oxford last week.  One of the sessions that interested me most was a case study on using video demonstrations in software user assistance. By “videos”, the presenter meant screencasts rather than live action.

What was interesting and distinctive about the solution was that, even though it demonstrated a series of steps through a task, it contained no mouse movement or animated typing effects.  Instead it showed a series of static screenshots, each of which showed the result of completing each step, with simple animations highlighting particular fields and areas of the screen.  A voiceover narration described the sequence of actions required.  A conscious decision not to include mouse movement and typing had been made because it was deemed that the audience did not need to be shown either how to move their mouse around or how to type text.  Read more...

Text to Speech in Captivate 5.x

 Captivate  No Responses »
Aug 192011
 

Research has repeatedly shown that learners benefit from multimodal (both visual and auditory) instruction, so using a speech commentary is a great way to engage learners with eLearning.  You can choose either to record a human voice (perhaps even your own) or to use Captivate’s Text to Speech (TTS) feature.  This simulates human speech based on text that you provide as Slide Notes.  Read more...

Adobe Captivate Widgets (part 2)

 Captivate  2 Responses »
Jul 272011
 

In a recent blog post, I introduced the subject of Captivate Widgets, explaining what they are  and why you might choose to use them.  In this post, I will go on to discuss the distinct types of Widgets, and will provide brief instructions on how to insert them into a project.  Finally, I will mention a few of the most useful Widgets that I have come across recently.

There are three distinct types of Widget:  Read more...

What’s new in Captivate 5.5?

 Captivate  1 Response »
Jul 072011
 

A few weeks ago, and out of the blue, Adobe announced and released on the same day a new version of Captivate.  Despite its incremental version number of 5.5, this is a full new release of Adobe Captivate, and existing 5.0 users will need to pay to receive the upgrade.  This release coincides with the release of the Adobe eLearning Suite 2.5, of which Captivate 5.5 is a key component.  Read more...

Adobe Captivate Widgets (part 1)

 Captivate  No Responses »
Jun 242011
 

Recently someone drew my attention, through a comment on one of my posts, to a very useful Captivate Widget that enables you to associate actions with a mouseover event for any object.  Inspired by this, I thought it might be a good time to discuss Widgets in general: what they are, and how they can help you with your Captivate development.

A Widget is a piece of software code that extends the normal functionality of Adobe Captivate.  It is typically written by a Flash developer using Adobe Flash, and supplied to the Captivate author as a .swf file. If there is any new feature of Captivate that you require (for example, a text caption with some special behaviour, or a new type of quiz question) it is possible that it could be provided by a Widget.  Read more...

Using a Rollover Slidelet to Simulate a Rollover Effect

 Captivate  1 Response »
May 132011
 

It is always an aim of mine, when creating software simulations with Captivate, to make them as true as possible to the real application. But up until recently, I had not thought it possible to simulate mouseover effects (such as tooltips, button effects, highlighting etc.) that often occur in applications prior to clicking.  Read more...

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