Usecase: Say you need to administer a quiz, where the learner has to answer all the questions in the quiz in sequence (he is not provided the option to skip). Also, at the end of the quiz, he should be provided an option to review the quiz.

To achieve this, you would go to project>skin editor and uncheck ‘show playback control’. But the user is still presented with the ‘skip’ button during the Quiz. Now, if you decide to uncheck the ‘show skip button’, the user will no longer have any means to navigate during review. Also, during review, he is needlessly shown the ‘clear’ and ‘submit’ buttons, adding to the clutter.

For the best experience, you should be able to hide the ‘skip’ button during Quiz presentation, and hide the ‘submit’ and ‘clear’ buttons during review. Now  Vikram has created a couple of Captivate widgets that will help you achieve this.

To use this, copy them to your widgets folder (program files, adobe, adobe captivate, gallery, widgets);  insert the widgets on the first question slide or the first slide of the project and in options set it to display for the rest of project.

Under edit> preferences>quiz>settings: uncheck ‘allow backward movement’. And that’s it- you don’t have to make any changes in the question slide options (leave the clear and skip button checked).

Do remember that these are AS3 widgets and should be used in AS3 projects (go to edit> preferences>project>publish settings>select AS3).

Widget: Hide Skip

Widget: Hide Submit and Clear

captivate quiz,hide skip button,captivate widget

Posted by Shameer Ayyappan at 1:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Adobe Captivate 4 has a feature using which you can access and control captivate movies from external movies. You can find more details here.

Here is how you access Adobe Captivate movie variables from external swf:

Action Script 3:
root.<variable_name>
Ex: root.rdinfoCurrentSlide, root.cpInfoAuthor

Action Script 2:
_root.<variable_name>
Ex: _root.rdinfoCurrentSlide, _root.cpInfoAuthor

Note : Few of the variables in Captivate AS2 movie are defined inside movie class. Hence cannot be accessed directly with _root. In these cases _root.movie.<variable_name> is the correct way to access variables defined inside rdmovie class. As a general rule, for AS2 to access a variable we should first try access it using _root.<variable_name>, if that comes undefined, then access using _root.movie.<variable_name>.

Variables that are defined inside the movie class are: cpInfoCurrentDateString, cpInfoCurrentDate, cpInfoCurrentMonth, cpInfoCurrentYear, cpInfoCurrentDay, cpInfoCurrentTime, cpInfoCurrentHour, cpInfoCurrentMinutes, cpInfoEpochMS, cpCmndVolume, cpInfoElapsedTimeMS, rdcmndGotoSlide, cpCmndGotoFrameAndResume, rdcmndNext, rdcmndPlaybarMoved, rdcmndMute, rdcmndCC, rdisMainMovie, cpInfoCurrentSlide, cpInfoCurrentSlideType

Blog post by - Deepak R, Adobe Captivate

captivate variables,access

Posted by Rajeev Kumar at 1:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

learning,e-learning,advanced actions,conditional statments,captivate,quiz

You are creating a quiz in your e-learning project in Adobe Captivate. You intend to grant grades(such as A, B,C) to students based on the percentage scored by a student out of total score.

This was the use-case I had thrown in my last post. In my last post you learnt how to create an advanced action and add assignment & standard action statments to an advanced action. If you are still wondering as in how to implement above use-case using assignment and standard actions only, then well let me tell you that you would not be alone. You cannot implement the above use-case by just using assignment and standard actions. You would need something more. You need conditional statements in your advanced action. And this post aims to help you with that.

In this post I would show you as to how the above use-case can be achieved comprehensively using advanced actions.

Follow the following steps to achieve this use-case;

1. Create three user-variables:
   1. Total  - to store the total marks in a quiz.
   2.  Scored - to store the actual marks scored by a student taking the quiz.
   3. Result - to store the final percentage.
   4. Grade – to store the final grade obtained by the student. This post tells you how to create user variables in Adobe Captivate.
2. Create an Advanced action: sc1.

After storing the relevant values in appropriate variables, calculate the percentage of marks scored by the student. That would look like : (Scored/Total) X 100.

So your ‘Result’ variable stores the percentage of marks scored by a student. Now you need to assign different grades based on the percentage of marks scored by the student. Say:

Grade A - %age > 80

Grade B – 60< %age <=80

Grade C - %age <=60.

After adding condition to check if the percentage is greater than 80, you need to add new conditions to assign Grade B and Grade C. Remember that you cannot include a condition statement inside a condition statement.

Now in order to assign Grade B, you need to check whether the percentage lies between 60% and 80%. For this we would need an ‘AND’ operation.

After you have your advanced action in place, you could execute this advanced action on the Slide enter action of any slide(after the quiz results slide) which displays the variable grade(say in a text caption).

Hope by now, you would have got a good understanding of variables and advanced actions. All the ground work for variables and advanced actions is done by this post…..so you should be ready to fly now. If you have any queries do drop me a line… Cheers!!

Posted by Manish Anand at 4:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

e-Learning,Captivate,Advanced Actions,Variables,Learning

You are creating a quiz in your e-learning project in Adobe Captivate. You intend to grant grades(such as A, B,C) to students based on the percentage scored by a student out of total score.

How will you do it?? Well, Advanced Actions can help you.

Adobe Captivate allows to execute actions i.e. “Execute advanced action” on various events that happen within a captivate movie while the movie is playing. These events include On slide enter/exit, On interactive object’s success/failure condition, When a text entry box loses focus, when user rollovers/clicks the rollover area of rollover slidelet object, question slide’s success/failure condition etc.

This post intends to teach you create an advanced action and add statements to it. So without wasting any time let’s get down to the business...

How to create an Advanced Action:

• Goto  ‘Project’ menu and select ‘Actions’ menu-item.
• Actions Dialog comes up.
• Select the ‘Advanced Actions’ tab.

So now you know how to create an Advanced Action. Pretty easy!  Right??

Now we would learn how to actually add statements to this Advanced Action. When I say statements to the advanced action it means the various activities this advanced action is supposed to do. But before that a small pill of basics about Advanced Action:

Using Advanced Actions you can use the following options to define actions in Captivate:

• Condition - provide if...else conditions with and/or operators.
• Assignment - can assign value/variable to both Captivate exposed and user created variables.
• Standard action - you could use a single advanced action to run multiple actions in a sequence.

Now in order to understand how to add statements to your actions, let us first define a problem:

Say in your e-learning project, upon a button click the following should happen:

• A value is assigned to a user created variable (say var 1). This post explains how to create variables.
• http://www.adobe.com/products/captivate should open.

Solution:

• Insert a button.

So your advanced action is ready. This advanced action gets executed when a user clicks on the button. In my next post I would explain how to use conditional statements in advanced actions. Till then I would advise you all to get your hands dirty with advanced actions.

Posted by Manish Anand at 5:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Globalization,Adobe captivate,elearning Suite,localisation,SCORM,resuse

The two most important questions that a learner needs to ask is the "who" and "what" question. In the globalized world, the who question seldom returns a set of learner who are homogenous. The set of potential learner for a course could be from different geography, having different cultural backgrounds and language preferences. Indeed some maybe operating in somewhat different business environments.

The easy and potentially expensive solution would be to reduce this diversity into smaller homogenous groups and then create a course for each and every of these groups. Course maintenance to take care of updates could become tricky, as changes in the common parts of the course needs to be updated across the variants. Embracing the reuse mantra in SCORM through creation of reusable modules (called SCO in SCORM-talk) and then packaging them through tools like the Adobe SCORM Packager (part of the Adobe eLearning Suite), or Adobe Captivate Aggregator functionalily. This will allow you to reduce maintenance efforts and ensure that changes made to common modules have been deployed across all variants uniformly.

Localization of content is a significant challenge in our rapidly globalized workplace. IT training on new software from Adobe, Microsoft, SAP, Oracle etc. are localized in tens (indeed hundreds in some cases) of languages as business is no longer restricted in Americas or EMEA. Soft-skills training need to be localized as also globalized to take into account cultural sensitivities. The traditional SLA between client and content creator required that all content be externalized, so that they can be changed by the client without the engagement of the vendor. Content as in audio, video, graphics, text.

While this does work in theory, often it creates a situation where we are trying to fit a round nail through a square hole! Trying to ensure that the German text fits into the space vacated by the English space can require more iterations than we think. In software development, we can create a dialog box which may have some strings ending with "...". Or get strings truncated. Can we afford the same in eLearning?  Now try doing the same with audio and video! Customers having paid for the externalisation framework, often enough find themselves back to the vendors to make changes that they thought they would be making internally.

An alternate methodology maximizes the usage of rapid tools like Adobe Captivate in content creation and content integration. This would allow you to maintain the content and effect small changes to the content internally (and in cases in local offices) using resources who are icon-draggers with no scripting skills. And all this without any reduction in learnability of the content.

While major changes will still require a call to the vendor, we save significantly overall if we use rapid tools and reuse.

Posted by Tridib Roy Chowdhury at 10:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Text2Speech,Pronunciation

Adobe Captivate 4 Text-to-Speech feature gives a Dictionary Editor tool to add or change the pronunciation for a word. This tool is available at <Adobe Captivate Installation Dir>\VT\<agent>\M16\bin\UserDicEng.exe. The default version of this tool is not unlocked. So when a word is added/changed and its pronunciation is tested, it announces that it is a trial license. This post explains how to fix this. Follow the steps below to correct this problem in your installation -

1. Open the Windows Explorer and browser to the directory where Adobe Captivate is installed. By default it is 'C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Captivate 4'.

2. If the Text-to-Speech engine is installed, then there will be a 'VT' directory in this directory. This directory will have directories for 'Kate' and 'Paul' agents.

3. Go to directory 'VT/Kate/M16/bin' directory.

4. Rename the 'UserDicEng.exe' as 'UserDicEng_backup.exe'.

5. Download the new UserDicEng.exe file from here and put it in this directory.

6. Repeat the same steps for 'Paul' agent.

Now, you should not hear the trial license message when you add/change the pronunciation of any word.

Quick Tip - We have seen that 'Create' is not pronounced properly by the speech engine. So, you can fix this by specifying the target as 'cree ate' for this source word 'create'.

Posted by Ashish Garg at 9:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

Variables in Adobe Captivate act as placeholders for data. The relevant data is associated with the variable during user input or when the output SWF is played. Adobe Capativate supports two types of variables:

• System Variables: These are pre-defined variables, which carry a Captivate movie’s information. In Adobe Captivate, system variables are classified as follows:
• MovieControl: variables for events that control the movie like pause, resume, previous, next slide, and so on.
• MovieInformation: variables related to the movie such as variables for the current slide, current frame, and so on.
• MovieMetaData: variables that provide information about the project such as project name, author, and company.
• SystemInformation: variables that can be picked up from your computer such as current date and current time.
• Quizzing: variables related to quizzing, such as the variables that capture the number of attempts and the percentage of questions answered correctly.

The exhaustive list of System variables is enumerated in this post

• User Variables: Variables that you create and to which you assign a name and value. You can use user-defined variables to store data that is used or updated many times in the Adobe Captivate project. Each variable has a unique name, and a value corresponding to the text that is stored in it. When you modify the value of a variable, the changes to the corresponding text are reflected throughout the project.

How to create user variables:

• Goto ‘Project’ menu.
• Select ‘Actions’ menu-item. The actions dialog comes up what is shown below.

So now you have created your variable. This variable is nothing but a user variable.

Information about system variables:

To know about them you just need to select “System” in the “Type” dropdown in the actions dialog:

Now that you know about User and System variables the next obvious question would be ‘what can I do with these variables?’ Well, you could do many things with these variables, which I shall explain in detail in my future posts. As of now I will tell you two basic usecases for variables:

• Show variables in a Text Caption.
• Show variables in a Drawing Toolbar Objects.

Show variable in a Text Caption:

Consider a case where-in you want to show ‘current slide of the total slide’ information in your project. For example, if your project has 10 slides and if user is on the first slide, this information would look like: 1 of 10.

• Insert a text caption.

Show variables in Drawing Toolbar objects:

• Draw a rectangle.
• Select the rectangle and press “F2”. The TextEdit toolbar comes up.

I am sure that this post would have helped you to break ice with Variables.In my upcoming posts I will tell you about Advanced Actions. Once you get a hold of Advanced Actions, then we would discuss the ‘what and how’ of variables and Advanced Actions in Adobe Captivate 4. Till then I encourage you to try a date with variables!!

Variables,Advanced Actions,Adobe Captivate 4,system variables

Posted by Manish Anand at 2:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Have you ever felt the need of sending an e-mail notification as soon as a course or a captivate demonstration is over. We know about the “Send E-Mail” button in the Results slide but what if there are no question slides or quiz in your project??

Here is how you could do this very easily using the following steps:

1. Add a question slide and then remove the quiz slide so that only the result slide remains. In the result slide delete everything and just have"Continue" and "Send E-mail" butons. Add a caption saying "Click the button blah...blah to send the progress etc."

2. Remove the playbar (scrubber) so that the end user has to go thru each of the slides in the demo project.

3. In the Quiz->Reporting->E-Mail and enter the email id of the person to whom the mail needs to be sent.

4. In this case he shall get an e-mail with the scores showing 0, 0, 0, but he shall get an intimation saying that a particular user has completed the course. But if he wants to make it more readable he needs to change the “email_attach.htm" which can be found at InstallDirectory\Adobe\Adobe Captivate 4\Templates\Publish and change the parameters for:

function sendMail()

{

      var  konq, saf, moz;

      document.emailForm.action = 'mailto:' + gstrEmailTo + '?subject=' + gstrEmailSubject

      document.emailForm.elements["Results"].value = "\r" + gstrEmailBody;

      konq = ( navigator.userAgent.indexOf( 'Konqueror' ) != -1 );

      saf = ( navigator.userAgent.indexOf( 'Safari' ) != -1 );

      moz = ( navigator.userAgent.indexOf( 'Gecko' ) != -1 && !saf && !konq);

      if(moz)

      {

            document.emailForm.enctype = 'text/plain';

      }

      document.emailForm.submit();

}

Posted by Sikandar Pradhan at 12:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Recording narration in Adobe Captivate's audio record dialog by reading out the slide note text is a common workflow. For this, one would use the slide notes window which is available at the bottom of the ‘Record Audio’ dialog. But usability becomes an issue when your slide notes are too lengthy to fit in the small slide notes compartment provided at the bottom. And yes, as users must have discovered, there is no easy way to resize the window too! So now while recording, you need to scroll down the slide notes which adds to the clicks and scrolls while doing your narration.

There is a very simple trick to get around this problem. Hover your mouse over the pointer to the left of the slide notes / captions window.

The mouse pointer changes and gives control to the slide notes panel. Just click and drag the slide notes window out from the ‘Record Audio’ dialog. Now you can easily resize the slide notes component thus making it very easy to read out the slide notes while recording narration. It will look something like this.

So now you can avoid those disturbing clicks and scrolls while recording your audio!

resize slidenotes in record dialog,narration,slide notes

Posted by Mukul Vinay Lele at 10:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A typical scenario for creating an elearning course with Captivate is to create multiple 5-10 min modules of Captivate movies that are integrated using the aggregator or the multi-sco packager or by creating your own navigation shell using Flash Pro. Today, I’ll show you another option that is available for creating a course with multiple modules.

The Adobe eLearning Suite integrates Adobe Captivate and Adobe Acrobat Pro to help you create a PDF portfolio containing your Captivate movies, complete with rich navigation. You can easily publish these n the web or distribute it via email. Your learners just need the free Adobe Reader on their computers to view this content. One note of caution: If your content contains assessments or significant interactivity, then this is not the best mode to publish in. 

Here’s an example of how you can achieve this. We will create an E-Learning course to teach ‘alphabets’, ‘numbers’ and ‘shapes’ to kids. So instead of creating a single Captivate project containing all the content, it will be broken down into smaller modules. Start by creating a Captivate project on ‘alphabets’ and publish it as a PDF. This option is available in the Publish dialog.

Just check the box which says 'export PDF' and publish the project. In the published folder, you will now get a PDF file which contains the embedded Captivate SWF.

Continue reading "Captivate - Acrobat Integration" »

Posted by Mukul Vinay Lele at 2:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

Greetings, widget enthusiasts!! In this post I am going to help you create your first Captivate Widget in just a few steps. And by the end of this post you will be able to actually see your widget in Action inside Captivate.

Today I’ll demonstrate how you can create a simple ‘Print Slide’ widget. So, shall we get started? Launch Captivate and do a File->New->Widget in Flash. Choose Widget type -> Static and ActionScript Version-> ActionScript2.0. Hmm, now you see Flash (provided you have Flash installed on your machine) is launched and an untitled page is opened in it.

1. In Flash go to Window->Components and from User Interface select-drag a button and drop on the stage. Select the button and then go to Window->Component Inspector->Parameters Tab and then in the “label” field change the label to “Print”.

Now back on the Properties panel give the instance name of the button as “Print_btn”. 

2. Now select the edit area (or the stage) and change the Document ‘Size’ to 120X 50 in the Properties panel by selecting the document and then clciking on the Edit button. We make this change to ensure that the final widget consumes minimum real estate on the Captivate slide. The document size might differ according to the requirements.

3. Place the “Print” button in the middle of the document and align it appropriately horizontally and vertically so that it looks like this :

Continue reading "Captivate Widgets Tutorial: Create your first Widget" »

Posted by Sikandar Pradhan at 4:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)

Lynda.com has just launched a new Captivate 4 tutorial. This is authored by Tim Plummer, Jr. The tutorial covers the essentials of Captivate 4. Tim is a Sr. Solutions Engineer in Adobe Sales and has extensive experience both as an educator and as a presenter. He provides a unique perspective covering the features not just from a traditional elearning angle- but also talks about how Captivate can be used to create good looking projects for high impact communication. In this vein, he refers to Captivate as ‘Flash, for the rest of us’.

For a $25 monthly subscription, one can access all the courses on Lynda.com, which includes the latest set of tools offered in the Adobe eLearning Suite and CS4. The Captivate 4 course runs 4 hrs and is organized into 4-5 min modules. By the end of this, the learner will have a strong foundation on Captivate 4. Tim even covers some of the more involved Captivate 4 features like ‘variables’ in this essentials training. I do believe there are a some useful features that have not been covered- including the current favorite Text-to-speech, Advanced actions, and Aggregator. I have linked to some material on this blog which should help with these features; also, another good source for this training is Kevin Siegel’s book on Captivate 4.

Also check out the set of 'getting started' tutorials offered by Adobe.

captivate 4 tutorial,lynda.com

Posted by Shameer Ayyappan at 11:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Adobe Captivate 4 patch update is already live and many must have already installed it. Some customers faced problems installing the update from the Adobe Updater due to security reasons, firewalls set in their organizations.

Now Adobe Captivate 4 patch update is also available on web and can be downloaded from the following link -

http://www.adobe.com/support/captivate/downloads.html

You just need to download the patch ZIP file, unzip it and run the 'setup.exe'.

To know more about the issues resolved in patch update, please click here.

Adobe Captivate 4 patch update

Posted by Mukul Vinay Lele at 12:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Audio narration is an integral part of an eLearning course and till now one needed to hire external resources to do voice overs to their projects. Gone are those days – You can now do it yourself using Adobe Captivate 4’s new text-to-speech feature.

But there is one limitation in this. Only the text in slide notes panel can be converted to speech. Now when recording (capturing) an application, Captivate generates auto captions for all the steps involved. This is a huge time saver.  You might now want to convert these captions to audio narration, as these captions are already telling a story and you don’t want to reinvent the wheel. You can do it in following way –

• Go to each slide. Find the captions you want to convert. Write the text to notes panel and convert to speech.
• To save time you can copy paste the text of captions to notes panel.

The drawback to above approach is that there is a lot of manual steps needed and finding each caption and pasting it to the notes panel in a large project can be tedious.

Here is a simple tip to enhance your productivity in converting these auto captions to voice over narrations:

• Open the captured project where you want to use this functionality.
• Go to menu – Audio -> Record. You get the following dialog. Though this is audio recording dialog but we will use just a part of its functionality to alter our slide notes –

Continue reading "Productivity tip: Quickly convert auto captions to voice over narration" »

Posted by Rajeev Kumar at 7:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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

Posted by Rajeev Kumar at 11:40 AM | Permalink

Adobe Captivate,context menu,elearning,content authoring

In my last post, you saw what how to view content on mouse rollover and simultaneously have an action performed on mouse click, both on single object. After going through my last post I am sure you are still wondering as to “How do I get a context menu appear  on mouse rollover over any object in Adobe Captivate?” Well your wait is over now. This post shows the simulation of context menu which appears on mouse rollover over any object.

Have a look at this project:

Objective: To show a context sensitive menu on mouse rollover on any object. Then exit the context menu on mouse rollout on that object.

How the objective is achieved:

I have used rollover slidelet again to achieve the objective of this project. You do not need the slidelet here so I have hidden the slidelet( you could do it by minimizing it to minimum dimension and putting a highlight box/image over it). Now for the rollover area, you could have an ‘On rollover’ action. You can set this under the ‘Advance’ tab on the properties dialog of the rollover area. Here, I have associated “Goto next slide” action on rollover. Now for the rollout action, you need rollover areas around the context menu and the rollover area. I have associated “Goto last visited slide” action on rollover over these rollover areas. How to use rollover slidelets in Adobe Captivate?

Finally, did you know:

You could redraw the rollover area and shape it like any polygon..

•  Select the rollover area of the rollover slidelet and do a right click.
• Select Redraw shape.

You could edit points of the rollover area.

• Select the rollover area of the rollover slidelet and do a right click.
• Select “Edit Points”.

These two projects show what I had in my mind. Now since you have the basics it’s high time you put that creative hat ON! Happy authoring!!

Download the source file of above project

Posted by Manish Anand at 4:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Adobe eLearning Suite,eLearning,Adobe Captivate,Rollover Slidelet

Have you ever wondered while authoring your elearning content, “How do I get a context menu appear  on mouse rollover over any object in Adobe Captivate?”. Have you ever questioned yourself, “In Adobe Captivate, how do I get to view content on mouse rollover and simultaneously have an action performed on mouse click, both on single object?” . Well, if you  did have such “How do I….s” then  you hit the right node by coming to this post. This post would guide you through to achieve them by using Rollover Slidelet and a little bit of creativity!

So without wasting any more time lets get started. Please have a look at the first project:

Objective of this project:  To show point product details upon mouse rollover and its usage/position in rapid authoring workflow when user clicks over that product.

How the objective is achieved:

I have used rollover slidelets to achieve the set objective of this project. I have placed the point product details on the slidelet, which comes up when the user hovers over the rollover area. This rollover area is placed on the point product icon image. You can set the hover delay(i.e. the time taken by the slidelet to appear when the mouse is hovered over the rollover area) on the properties dialog of the rollover area, under the “Options” tab. Then I have assigned an ‘On click’ action on the rollover slidelet. Confused?? How could I have both slidelet appear on mouse rollover and ‘On Click’ action?? Yes, you could have both ‘On click’ action(just like any interactive object such as button, click box) on the rollover area and the corresponding slidelet coming up on mouse rollover on the rollover area. See how to set these settings for a rollover slidelet.

Are you wondering how am I able to show that red arrow on each product (on slide 2) based on the click on the first slide?? Well that is achieved by variables and scripting!! see for yourself.

So now you know what could rollover slidelet could do for your elearning course. Still wondering how to show a context menu on mouse rollover. Well for that you will have to wait for my next post...........

Download the source file of above project

Posted by Manish Anand at 7:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Captivate 4,captivate forum

Many of you might not be aware of one of the most valuable online resources Captivate has- the Captivate Forum on Adobe.com. This forum is supported by a community of passionate Captivate experts who respond to every conceivable issue and problem you might run into. Many of them have been involved with this product for much longer than the current development team, and have contributed significantly to this product's growth.
This forum has now been revamped with a much cooler UI, new features and an overhaul of the underlying technology to improve overall user experience.

Some of the changes include:

• Improved search: Search the entire collection of forums using wildcards, fuzzy search, proximity search, weighted search, and Boolean search via the powerful new search functionality. You can also limit your search to the title, body, or attachment.
• E-mail connection: Receive messages directly in your e-mail inbox by subscribing to forums or threads of interest. You can even post messages by replying from your e-mail program.
• RSS support: Subscribe to RSS feeds on your favorite forums.
• Rich text editor: Use the rich text editor to create posts, add attachments, and embed images. (you can now attach Cp movies showing the issue or the steps to be followed to fix something)
• Ability to get noticed: Earn points through participation that demonstrate your expertise in the community.

I would like to give a shout out to rick, larry, joe, marc, eric, steve, john, frank and the rest of the community experts and thank them for their contributions. So the next time you have a Captivate or eLearning Suite related question go right to the forum.

Posted by Shameer Ayyappan at 11:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Captivate 4,Captivate tutorials

Late last year, I had blogged about a set of Captivate 3 tutorials on the Adobe website. These were specifically crated for the education industry and most of our readers have found them very useful. This has now been completely refreshed for Captivate 4- with new topics on the key Captivate 4 features. The PDFs are below:

• Recording and Publishing software simulations
• Roundtripping with MS PowerPoint
• Scenario Simulations using Captivate
  
• Editing Captivate Projects
  
• Creating Quizzes
  
• Creating dynamic presentations with the new 'Variables'
  
• Adding Audio to your project
  
• Adding videos to your project
  

Also on the Adobe website are a set of video tutorials on Captivate 4 basics (some of these are present in the product itself). These Captivate movies can be accessed here:

• Adobe Captivate workspace
• Recording Adobe Captivate projects
• Editing Adobe Captivate projects
• Publishing Adobe Captivate projects
• Designing templates
  
• Working with project templates
  
• Adobe Captivate and Microsoft PowerPoint
  
• Adding interactions to projects
  
• Audio
  
• Creating quizzes in Adobe Captivate
  
• Table of contents
  
• Drawing
  
• Importing PSD files into Adobe Captivate
  
• Aggregator
  
• Reviewing Adobe Captivate projects
  
• Rollover slidelets
  
• Text to speech
  
• Variables and advanced actions
  
• Widgets

Posted by Shameer Ayyappan at 4:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (27)

text to speech,pronunciations,Adobe Captivate 4

'Text To Speech Dictionary' is the functionality you should look for. Today we provide you a basic demo of how to make Text to Speech alter the pronunciations.

Actually its very simple. If you have installed Text to Speech Utility and Captivate 4, then a tool called 'Text to Speech Dictionary' is available at \Program Files\adobe\Adobe Captivate 4\VT\\M16\bin. Reach the location and look for "UserDicEng.exe"

Double click the EXE and it will launch 'English User Dictionary Editor". Now follow the below steps in order to change the pronunciation of any particular word.

1. Click File Open and point it to the dictionary file. It is located at -
\Program Files\adobe\Adobe Captivate 4\VT\\M16\data-common\userdict\
2. This directory will store the word you enter along with its new pronunciation
3. Click "Add word" and enter the 'original word'. e.g 'Jimmy'
4. Now enter the 'target word', i.e. the corrected pronunciation using the alphabets or the Pronunciation Symbol.
5. At any point of time, you can click 'Read Word' and listen to your pronunciation of the new word (target word). If not satisfied, you can edit the target word and listen to it once again.
6. Once the word is ready with the new pronunciation, just click 'File Save' and the new word along with its pronunciation is saved. It will be used by the particular speech Agent inside Captivate.

To use the the new pronunciation inside Captivate, just use the 'original word' and convert 'text to speech'. The newly created pronunciation will be used and audio file will be created. A captivate movie describing these steps is attached below (turn up your speaker volume).

Do try this functionality which allows you to create much more personalized and natural speeches. Please share your experiences and observations with us.

Posted by Mukul Vinay Lele at 6:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (22)

customizing captivate playbar,localizing captivate playbar,captivate 4

Consider a scenario where you want to create content in some different language, say German or Hindi. You created the content properly, but then you discover that the play-bar shows its tool-tips in English. Did you know that you can localize the play-bar tooltips to match your content? This post shows you how…

Img 1. English tool-tips

Img 2. Italian tool-tips

Continue reading "Localizing play-bar tool tips" »

Posted by Sunil Muthiyan at 4:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Adobe Captivate,Captivate webinar,Adobe eLearning suite

RJ, our eLearning evangelist, will be conducting a live eLearning session on 'Getting started with the new features in Adobe Captivate 4'. The session will provide you good working knowledge on the new features in Captivate 4 like Templates, Text-to-Speech, SWF Reviewer, Variables and Scripting, Widgets, TOC, Aggregator, new publish options, PSD import and more. RJ's sessions are always packed with information and very interactive; hence they also tend to get filled very early. So if you've just purchased Captivate 4 or the Adobe eLearning Suite, or are testing out the trial, you should plan to attend this session.

To quote RJ: "... no registration is required, but please keep in mind that my Connect Pro room only handles 400 people, so please log in as early as 30 minutes before the start time and the Virtual Classroom doors will close promptly at 10am PST to avoid distractions."

When: Friday, March 6, 2009 at 10:00am - 12.00 Noon Pacific Time

Where: http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/adobelearningsolutions/

Login instructions: Please click the link above as early as 30 minutes before the start time, enter as Guest, type your Full Name and click Enter Room. 

You can find more information on this session here.

Posted by Shameer Ayyappan at 9:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Adobe Captivate,Captivate TOC

Image 1. Default TOC

Image 1 shows the default captions in TOC that Adobe Captivate creates. Captivate allows us to change the captions in TOC so that the TOC can look like the example shown in Image 2.

Image 2. TOC with changed captions

Now let’s see how we can do it.

Continue reading "Changing default captions in TOC" »

Posted by Sunil Muthiyan at 6:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (23)

Large eLearning projects are always difficult to maintain and the authoring process is inefficient because of lack of parallelism and collaboration.

Adobe Captivate 4 allows you to break up project into bite-sized modules which can be authored and maintained by multiple people.

Modular development has the following advantages:

• Allows parallel development - many people working on the same project at same time
• Delivers scalability – manages performance at authoring as well as delivery time as the project size grows.
• Maintainability

I shall be discussing these three points in this blog.

Continue reading "Creating large modular projects using Captivate 4" »

Posted by Sunil Muthiyan at 7:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (22)