Using Effects inside ‘Advanced Actions’
In this article, I would like to add usage of ‘Effects’ in ‘Advance Actions’ to make captivate movie look more effective and jazzy. If you are not familiar with ‘Effects’ feature you might want to refer to this blog post.
http://blogs.adobe.com/captivate/2010/07/a_picture_is_worth_a.html
Before getting into ‘Advanced Actions’, I would like to explain ‘Effect’ nomenclature briefly. To apply an effect, we need a target object on which the effect is applied. Also you might want to configure the effect to possible extent. However there are certain effects that do not have any configuration parameters. So an ‘Apply Effect’ action boils down to three tuple with ‘Configuration Parameters’ being optional:
[Target Object, Effect Name, [Configuration Parameters]]
For example say you have a highlight box (hbox1) and you want to rotate it. Usually one complete rotation is 360 degrees. You can choose ‘Emphasis->Clockwise Rotate’ to do one complete rotation.The above mentioned effect does not have any configuration parameters(It assumes 360 degree rotation). But you might also want to rotate the object to an arbitrary angle. To do that, choose ‘Basic->RotateTo’ effect and choose the ‘Rotation’ value to 180. The object rotates to 180 degrees.
Now let us get into some action. I would demonstrate an effect that is recently posted in of the captivate blogs.You can refer to the following link to know ‘How To Create Custom Effects’.
Note:
Since we are going to use a custom effect that is added to poject,I would like to add a small note that, user defined effects would be under ‘Effects->Custom’ category in ‘Advanced Actions’. I had imported the vibration effect xml into the project manually. You need to do the same(It is not a default effect that come with captivate)
Now, Using the effect, I would want to create a login page in which a password required to enter the course. If the password is incorrect, the textbox vibrates/shakes (mimics the MAC behavior). Let us see how it works.
. You need to create a new conditional action say ‘Password_Check_Action‘.
. Check the ‘Text_Entry_Box_1‘ variable against the correct password. You can see the screen-shots below.
. Attach the ‘Password_Check_Action‘ to submit button of the Login form.
Below swf checks against password. You can try it out on your own and see the effect. Right password is ‘password‘.
So far we have seen how to add an effect that does not have any configuration parameter. Now let us see an effect with configuration parameters. The following steps sho how to configure parameters for scale effect.
. Add a Hilightbox and a Button on to the stage
. Create a ’Standard Action‘
. Choose -> ‘Apply Effect‘ action
. Choose ‘Hilight_Box_1‘ as target object.
. Choose -> ‘Select Effect‘ -> ‘Basic‘ -> ‘ScaleTo‘
. Now click on the Button next to Effect to invoke effect parameter dialog.
. Change the values of scaleX and scaleY values and press ‘OK’
. Save the advanced action and attach it to Button.
. Preview the porject
I hope this gives a starting point to use ‘Effects’ in ‘Advanced Actions’ dialog.’
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