February 5, 2009

Authoring – limited by your creativity not the tool.

,,,

Captivate users – do you sometimes feel that we were cramping your style and limiting your creativity?

In simple terms, why could not Captivate allow you:

  • To use your creativity to define new buttons, charts, graphs and other display objects.
  • To explore with new quizzing experience to engage different user segments.
  • Take full advantage of the media revolution happening on YouTube/Flickr etc. and elsewhere on the net.

Sure, Captivate has a great set of quizzing options, interactions and support for rich media. But, as great as these are, how often have you felt that you could be better off by tweaking something, adding something – of course you could not.

What you had to do was an frustrating cycle of:

  1. Go to this page containing wish list form
  2. Fill up your feature request
  3. Someone from Adobe accepts this as a actionable feature request.
  4. Wait for next release of Captivate.
  5. Hopefully, you have finished your project by then and ready with another request! Go back to step 1!

Of course, if you were friendly with the in-house Flash developer, you could some of this and then add these as Flash animations through Captivate. But, of course if you wanted to make minor modifications later on in the authoring workflow or in the maintenance cycle, you needed to depend on the continuing goodwill of your Flash friend.

But, that was till Captivate 3. With Captivate 4 we enter the bold world of “Widgets” which allows you to extend Captivate authoring platform. Limited only by your creativity – well almost!

“Widgets” still need you to access a Flash Developer, but provides you with complete independence to make changes to the “widget” later on without you having any knowledge of ActionScript or Flash.

And keep watching this space for series of posts on this topic. This will include tutorials on creating widgets, sample widgets which you can use and finer details.

Posted by Rajeev Kumar5:23 PM
  • http://www.elearninglive.com mark

    Can we get the source to the Table of Contents swf, so that we can edit the graphics/look of it?markwww.elearninglive.com

  • Sunil Muthiyan

    >>MarkTOC is not something like play bars (based on how it is being handled in Captivate), where you publish a template swf file and captivate uses it at run time(Unfortunately).But, It gives a lot of flexibility for configuring its look and feel, along with the ability to change the text/caption in it. I am about to write a blog about it here in a couple of days.

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