Rapid eLearning | Adobe Captivate Blog

Adobe Captivate 4 patch update

Adobe Captivate 4 patch is now LIVE!

Today we released a patch for Adobe Captivate 4 patch. The key driver for this patch was the degradation in audio quality as reported by some of our customers. This update fixes several elements that were causing issues in the audio workflow. It also includes fixes for some other niggling concerns that were reported/ discovered post launch. The full details are below.

Do note that the Captivate 4 patch is not a critical update and hence will not be downloaded automatically on your systems. You will need to follow the menu items ‘Help > Updates’ and download the patch update. Once the update installs, Captivate 4 version number should read 1658.

Let me now run you through the fixes which have been included in this patch:

• Audio Quality improvement –
  • In Captivate 4, some users observed poor audio quality in the published movie. We’ve addressed all the elements that caused this issue. With this patch you will see a noticeable improvement in the audio quality.
•       USB Microphone support for Vista setups  and working well with RealTek and Sigma Tel soundcards –
  

  Captivate failed to recognize USB microphones on the Vista OS. Also, in some instances, specific sound cards were not recognized. Both these issues have now been resolved in the patch.

• Open another project’ now works from any location –
  

  In Captivate 4, the navigation option ‘open another project’ was based on an absolute path. This led to issues when these linked projects were published and moved to a different location. This has now been resolved.

• Inserting objects at playhead position –
  

  We have worked on an important productivity issue. Now it’s possible to insert objects at the exact position the playhead is on. This is helpful for content developers as they can easily play the slide on timeline, pause the slide at a specific time, and insert objects at the playhead position.

• Memory Leak in Image insertion and Editing –
  

  Few customers had reported memory leak issues while inserting and editing images. These have been investigated. The leak was significant only in a specific case and has been resolved now.

• Image quality while resizing is improved -
  

  There was some degradation in the image quality when images were resized inside Captivate 4. This patch will help address this.

• HTML page Title –
  

  Captivate now picks up the title name from Project preferences > Project name section. This name appears as the HTML title when the project is published and viewed in a browser.

• Question Type identification by LMS –
  

  This addresses a specific scenario in LMS reporting. We have worked on the way the question type data is reported to LMS systems.

• PPT slides containing Master Templates work well with Captivate –

Some PPT files containing Master templates were getting corrupted once published from Captivate 4. This has now been resolved.

• Widget Template is modified –

  Widget template had a few undefined variables which created compiling problems. This has been sorted out in this patch update.

We believe this patch will enhance your Captivate 4 experience. We look forward to your feedback on this.

Update: All those who cannot use the auto-updater to install the patch, can now download it from here: http://www.adobe.com/support/captivate/downloads.html

You make a nice captivate movie with all jazz and background audio. And there pops up a hidden glitch – end users of your captivate movie are short on bandwidth. But you, Mr. genious knows it pretty well that you have pre-loaders in Captivate to your rescue. So you go ahead and set the pre-loader percentage to 10%. This would mean that the movie will start playing when 10% of the content has loaded, with the remaining content  loading as the movie plays. Wow!! You punch the air and all that….

Next day you get your users complaining that your preloader ‘rocket science’ is not working at all. The movie content loads 100% before starting regardless of preloader setting. Amused?? What did you do wrong?? Confused??…well this post will help you.

your problem is…

Your movie has background audio across the movie. Ideally, as soon as the movie is loaded(after 10% preloading), the content should start playing. But to play the first slide, the associated audio is needed and since there is only one big audio file, Captivate attempts to load the entire audio file(irrespective of the slides) prior to play the content. And this eats up the bandwidth.

….and the solution is….

Inside Captivate, for each slide start the audio after 0.1 second. This prevents the audio to be stiched as one huge audio file in the final output. Consequently this would prevent the need to load the entire audio when you don’t intend to do so. And your content will start playing flawlessly with audio once 10% of the entire content is loaded (assuming that you set pre-loader=10%). Rest of the content loads in background.

So with this solution you could once again wear that genious hat. WOW!!

captivate,preloader,low bandwidth,audio,background audio

The workflow to do screen recordings has been changed in Adobe Captivate 4. The new workflow is more intuitive and user friendly. But do you sometimes feel that you are not able to position your recording area on the application exactly as you want.

For example – You want to record the browser window .In the scenario below you are not able to clearly position the window since the buttons of the capture window are blocking the browser window at corners

Would it help you if you were to hide the buttons and then reposition and resize the capture window. Press ALT and H key simultaneously. The window will look like the image below with buttons gone. You can position the capture window wherever you want.

When you are done press ALT and H simultaneously again. The buttons will come back as in image below –

captivate 4 capture tips and tricks

“I’m creating a demo on how to access a particular website. For distribution reasons I’m using a low res 800 X 600. This means that web pages need a lot of scrolling to navigate them. When playing back, the scrolling happens OK but then the image appears to jump back to the beginning of the scroll so that the mouse movements and text captions that follow are, although in the place they should be in relation to the viewing screen, are not pointing at the right bit of the web page.”

I am sure most of you must have experienced this scenario while capturing scrollbars using Adobe Captivate. Please see the following Captivate movie to get a hang of the issue, which is not exactly an issue but a preference option not utilised…. 

In order to avoid this issue please follow these steps prior to start automatic recording:

• Launch Captivate and press Shift + F8. This launches the preferences dialog.
• Browse to recording -> Settings.
• On the right hand side there is a checkbox capture interim screenshot
• Uncheck this option. Press Ok.

Now if you start automatic recording and  do the same scenario you would not run into the above issue.

Now in case if you face this issue and you are a position where-in you cannot re-capture then please see the following Captivate demo. This demo shows how to get the correct the slide image during edit time.

captivate,recording,preferences,interim screenshot

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The Captivate team will be at ASTD ICE next week. Both the Product Management and Engineering teams will be at the Adobe booth on all 3 days. If you would like to have a detailed chat regarding your wishlist for the future versions, or concerns you have with the current version, do visit us at Booth# 2517. We would love to hear from you in person. We will also have sign-up sheets for users who might be interested in participating in our pre-release.

ASTD ICE 2009,Captivate meet-up

articulate engage,adobe captivate,migration,reuse elearning content,adobe elearning suite

In previous posts we have seen how we can reuse Articulate Presenter files by converting it to Adobe Presenter files. Adobe presenter is a part of Adobe eLearning suite. In this post we will see how you can use existing Articulate Engage or Quizmaker output files inside Adobe Captivate 4 project.

The rule is “Adobe Captivate movie plays the engage movie as long as engage movie can find the dependent files as it is expecting. Publishing as external files and copying the dependent files to same folder helps maintain this rule”.

Both of these Articulate products namely Engage and Quizmaker creates output files in such a way that there is a main file – let us say “engage.swf” – and a directory where all the dependent files are kept. The trick to use them inside Adobe Captivate 4 is to insert the “engage.swf” as animation and publish them as external files and copy the engage dependent files to the same place as “engage.swf”.

Below are the steps you can follow to import the articulate files to Adobe Captivate 4

1. Open a blank file in Adobe Captivate 4
2. Select Insert->Animation and select “engage.swf”.
3. Say OK to the animation dialog.
4. Select Edit->Preferences -> Project -> Publish Settings – Check “Animations” so that animations are externalized or they are published as a separate file.
5. Say OK to the dialog.
6. Publish the Captivate project to a swf. Let us say “CaptivateArticulateEngage.swf”
7. Notice you will get “engage.swf” alongwith “CaptivateArticulateEngage.swf” in the published folder.
8. Now you have to make a structure similar in relation to “engage.swf”. So either copy the dependent folder and files of engage here or to make matters simple copy captivate published file to the same place where the original engage file exists on your computer.

Click here or the image below to see a Adobe Captivate 4 demo on how to do it.

We’re delighted to announce that the Adobe Captivate Blog has joined the eLearning Learning community. eLearning Learning is “a community that tries to collect and organize the best information on the web that will help you learn and stay current on eLearning.”

We believe this will now allow the Captivate community to keep track of both the product related posts and broader eLearning news and info from a single location. eLearning Learning aggregates my favorite blogs like Clive on Learning, eLearning Technology, and many others. This community aggregator has been a huge benefit for me, as it enables me to access a range of regularly updated e-learning content from a single RSS feed.

eLearning Learning

Cp4 variables,Captivate variables,captivate system variables

Michael recently posted the exhaustive list of Captivate 4 system variables in his blog. Below is a vetted version of the same. Some more variables have been added and the default value for the quiz variables have been defined..

MovieControl variables:

MovieInformation variables:

 MovieMetaData variables:

SystemInformation variables:

Quizzing variables:

 Update: Also look at Philip’s post on Cp variables: Captivate variables gone wild

Adobe Captivate,Localized Content,Rapid elearning,XLIFF

With the growing popularity of Adobe Captivate in the e-learning community across the globe, there comes the need of easy scalability.

A demo created in one language should be easily converted to another. Instead of redoing the project from scratch, CA3 and later versions provide a feature called XML Import /Export to effectively address conversion from one language to another.

A three step procedure could solve the problem:

1. Export English demo to XML by File->Export->To XML.

2. Replace the text to the desired localized text in the XML file.

3. Import the updates XML file by File->Import->From XML.

Adobe Captivate uses XLIFF (XML Localization Interchange File Format) version 1.2 for this feature and UTF -16 encoding.To know more about XLIFF, you could visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XLIFF

Note that each object /text has a one to one correspondence in the XML file. If we have deleted the object in our project, and import the original XML file, it will not add a new object. Similarly, if we have added removed a XML tag for an object, no changes would be made to the Captivate file when the XML is imported.

For a simple text caption, the following information is exported to the XML.

<group cp:datatype="x-object" extype="69" id="10124" restype="x-cp-items">

      <group cp:datatype="x-object" extype="19" id="10184" restype="x-cp-text-caption">

                <group cp:datatype="x-rtf" datatype="rtf">

                  <group cp:datatype="x-paragraph" css-style="text-align:center">

                    <trans-unit id="10184-19-1">

                      <source>

                        <g css-style="font-family:’Arial, nil’;color:#0000FF;font-size:12.0pt" ctype="x-cp-font" id="10184-19-1-1">Type caption text here</g>

                      </source>

                    </trans-unit>

                  </group>

The user can not only change the text but also change the style, font, color and size.

The Import/Export XML can also be used to change font, size and color of the following:

• Text captions
• Text Animations
• Rollover captions
• Default text and correct entries in Text entry box.
• Success/Failure/Hint captions and button text for all interactive objects.
• Text buttons
• Slide notes
• Text and rollover captions in rollover slidelet.
• Quiz buttons and feedback captions
• Project info
• project start and end text messages for password and expiry messages

Apart from changing text form one language to another, it can be used to effectively edit the above from a single file.

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Captivate,Mac,Beta

Yes, that’s right, the early builds of Captivate on Mac are ready and we would like some volunteers to test this out. We need testers with many different backgrounds and system configurations for trying the new features and providing feedback (you don’t have to be an existing user to participate).

If you are interested in helping us finding any bugs and providing feedback, please complete the:
Prerelease Interest Form
In the question ‘why do you want to participate in the pre-release program?’- please do mention your interest in the Mac version among other things.

FYI: If you are selected as a participant, you will be contacted when we start the prerelease program.

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Instructional designers community of India

The Instructional Designers Community of India will have it’s second meeting this year on May 23rd. The meeting will held at the Adobe office on Bannerghatta Rd in Bangalore. The community is rapidly growing and it is enthusiastically supported by some of the leaders in this field.
The details of what this group is all about can be found here. If you are involved in eLearning content creation, you should consider joining the group. You can join and follow the community in Linkedin.

Our previous Captivate version, Captivate 3, has trumped the latest versions from our competition to win Software & Information Industry Association’s 24th Annual CODiE Award for Best Corporate Learning Solution 2009.
"Now in its 24th year, the CODiE Awards continue to recognize those companies providing the best new technology products and services across a broad array of industries," noted SIIA President Ken Wasch. "In addition, its winners are a prolific testament to the power of technology to deliver innovative solutions to businesses and consumers…."

Adobe Captivate 4 was not eligible to compete for this award as the product was launched in 2009. But as mentioned in several reviews on the web, the feature packed Captivate 4 is the biggest release in Captivate’s history. This underlines the faith the community has placed in the product. eLearning Guild’s reports and surveys have indicated that close to 70% of this community uses Captivate.

Adobe has also won in the categories of best productivity solution, best communication solution, best document management solution, and best multi-media solution.

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