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)

File size could be an important consideration in creating eLearning contents especially in cases when it has to be put on websites or blogs. I was going through few discussions on web about file sizes best practices in Adobe Captivate. There are many things which you could do to reduce the file size. Most of them revolves around the quality of the assets inside the courses. The higher the quality – higher the file size.

If trying out the best practices is too cumbersome for you here is something from under the hood -

Go to “Publish” dialog.

Click on the hyperlink. It will be “custom” by default. You will get following dialog –

Play with the file size slider to get the result you want. This can also be used to create different size/quality content for different audiences. For web it could be of low size - low quality. For others cases it could be high quality - more size.

adobe captivate file size

Posted by Rajeev Kumar at 1:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

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)

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)

Easter egg is a hidden feature of Adobe Captivate 4 which is no way related to the functionality of the product.
It is a flash demo which contains photos of a lot of people who worked quite hard to bring this versions of Adobe Captivate to you.

To access the feature go to Help->About Adobe Captivate, The about dialog will pop up.
Now press "End" key. Be patient! and there you go.

Posted by Arif Ali Saiyed at 8:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Time! Needless to say that it is one thing every one of us is short of….

Captivate 3 introduced multi-mode recording- wherein you could record an application once, and generate 3 different projects from this recording- a demo, a simulation (training) and an assessment. This was a big timesaver. Now I’ll show you a way how you can take this one step further. Many a time, you would end up going into your recorded projects and making further fine grained edits to ensure that the project looks and behaves exactly as you envisioned. These edits will have to be repeated in each project mode (demo, simulation, assessment).

Today I’ll show you how you can create one recorded project, make the edits on this project, and then generate both the Training and Assessment modules in one shot (hence cutting your post production time in half!).

Let’s take an example:

Say you need to create a training and assessment module for “How to delete cookies in Internet Explorer?” The steps involved are:

Step 1: In the internet explorer, click on the ‘tools’ button.

Step 2: Select Internet options

Step 3: Under general tab, click on the ‘Delete’ button.

Step 4: In the Delete browsing history window, check the ‘cookies’ checkbox.

Step 5: Click the ‘Delete’ button.

 First of all let me tell you what is the difference between a training and an assessment module….both of these files are exactly the same with a small difference that in training file you have an extra ‘hint caption’ which assists an end user  as in what he/she is supposed to do next. This ‘hint caption’ is absent in an assessment module.

Now let’s get our hands dirty with the actual procedure… Go to edit> preferences> recording> modes> and ensure that ‘hint captions’ and ‘failure captions’ for both ‘click boxes’ and ‘text entry boxes’ are checked (as shown in the movie below). Record your project in ‘training’ mode. This recorded project can now be edited (post production) and published as your training module. Now to generate the assessment module, you open the project, select any one of the click boxes, and suppress the hint caption for that click box. Now you do an ‘apply all’ to disable all the hint captions across the project. A similar step should be followed when you have a text entry box. Watch this Captivate movie to see the detailed steps involved.

So now you know how you could save your editing hours!! Happy authoring....

Adobe,Captivate,e-learning,assessment,training

Posted by Manish Anand at 10:21 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)

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

Posted by Mukul Vinay Lele at 7:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (26)

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

Posted by Manish Anand at 1:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

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

“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

Posted by Manish Anand at 1:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

VTML (VoiceText Markup Language) - This Powerful hidden gem in Text to Speech helps you control the generated speech by adding pause, changing the pitch etc !

This post on customizing text to speech Pronunciations received many comments requesting a way to control the generated speech with html like tags.

The interesting thing is that this feature is already there in Captivate 4 ! Even more interesting is the fact that it is so simple to use. All you need to do is insert the appropriate tags into the slide notes. You can type in (or copy paste) the tags just like you do any other text.

Just before making this post, I quickly tried few of them:
1. Hello I am here <vtml_pause time="1000"/> for a break: Introduces a pause of 1 sec in between.
2. <vtml_speed value="50"> This is my text </vtml_speed>: Helps you control the speed of the text

There are many more similar useful tags. The VTML tags are listed in the Appendix C of the document here. It has a examples as well on the usage.

Posted by Sony Kadavan at 2:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (12)

adobe eLearning suite and articulate presenter,migrating old eLearning projects

Adobe eLearning suite consists of a set of products along with Adobe Captivate 4 and Adobe Presenter 7 using which you can create any kind of eLearning courses. With this you will not need any other eLearning tool in your arsenal. But when organizations decide to switch to a new product their foremost worry could be about existing content they have created using other tools. Well you need not worry about losing them. You can still use them inside Adobe Captivate and other products in eLearning suite.

For example - Files created in Articulate® Presenter can be opened and edited in Adobe Presenter. The original Articulate presentation is never modified; a copy of the presentation is converted and opened in Adobe Presenter. The Articulate assets folder should be available along with the Articulate presentation file. Without the asset folder and its contents, Articulate features cannot be imported into the presentation when it is opened in Adobe Presenter.

Adobe Presenter supports most Articulate Presenter data, including Flash, audio, and quiz information (as long as the Articulate Presenter assets folder is available).

What is not supported –

1. The following Articulate Presenter features are not supported: Learning Games, Engage Interactions, Insert Web Object.
2. Adobe Presenter does not support all Articulate Presenter question types. Unsupported questions are not imported during the conversion process. A detailed log report (ConversionLog.log) is generated at the end of the conversion process and provides details about the conversion, including an dropped questions.”

For complete details visit Adobe Presenter 7 help files. This is how you can do it -

In PowerPoint, open a presentation (PPT or PPTX file) created in Articulate Presenter.

1. In the conversion dialog box, click Yes.
2. Choose a name and save location for the converted presentation.
3. (Optional) To view information in the conversion log file, click View Log. (You can also use Windows Explorer at any time to view thelog file. Navigate to the location you specified in step 3, right-click the ConversionLog.log file, and select Open with > Notepad.)
4. After the conversion process finishes, click Close.
5. In Adobe Presenter, edit the new, converted file and add Adobe Presenter features as desired.

Click here or on the image below to see how to do it.It will open up Adobe Captivate 4 generated file.

Next post – We will see how you can use output files of Articulate inside Adobe Captivate 4.

Posted by Rajeev Kumar at 10:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Some Cp4 users have reported that when the Aggregator starts playing content movies- in certain scenarios sound from subsequent movies in the aggregator plays for a fraction of a second while the first movie is still playing. This issue is prominently seen in Firefox browser, although it occurs in Internet explorer some times.

There is an easy workaround for this issue:

Continue reading "Aggregator and Audio" »

Posted by Sunil Muthiyan at 7:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Adobe Captivate 4,Captivate library

Captivate accepts high quality images, animations, FLVs, audio files etc. Content generation is an iterative process and hence content developers use these resources across different sections of their project, and even across multiple projects. Captivate keeps track of all your resources to allow you to use it the next time. All these resources are placed in the  "Captivate Library".

Let's look at this basic but very powerful functionality which Adobe Captivate provides.

So, where is this 'Library' located?

Once you launch Adobe Captivate and open a blank project, go to Edit view and from the menu item select 'Window > Library' or use the shortcut 'ctrl-alt-L'

Library will show you the way it classifies your resources. i.e. Audio, Background, Images, Media and Presentations. Any resource you insert in your Captivate project will be placed in the library under appropriate category. Now let's look at the key features the Captivate library provides -

a] Easy access to resources

How often do you use the same image,audio clip or the same animation in a single project. Once you import the resource for the first time, you can just identify the resource in the library and drag and drop it on your slide the next time. Easy, isnt it!

b] Use resources from another CP file

Same resources are used in many different projects. Hence the library allows you to open and use the resources of any other Captivate project. To do this, just use the button 'Open Library' > click it and then point it to the other Captivate project.

c] Import many resources in a single step

You know in advance which all resources you are going to use in you project. In this case,the Library allows you to Import many resources at a time. Thus it will save time. Now you can use resources from library and drag and drop on the concerned slide.

d] Details about Size, Usage

It's very important to keep an eye on the size of final published swf. Although .swf compresses the data, lesser the size of original project, better it is. Hence you can keep a check on the resource file sizes from the library itself. Library gives the size details for each resource you import inside Captivate.

Wondering where all you have used a specific resource. It's easy to find. Just identify the resource in the library, right click and select 'usage'. Captivate gives you the slides on which the selected resource has been used.

e] Delete unused resources

Last but not the least, a very powerful utility, "Delete unused resources". As I said, content creation is an iterative process and the user inserts and removes many images, videos etc. Once removed from slide, they still continue to exist inside the Captivate project. This is done to allow you to use it, whenever needed, right from the library. But once your CP file size increases, it's always better to remove all unused resources from the Captivate project. To allow this, Captivate provides a small button just at the top of library, "Select unused items". Click it to select all the resources which are not being used in Captivate project. Right next to it is the 'Delete' button. It allows you to delete all these selected unused resources from the Captivate project.

These and many more functionalities are provided by Captivate library. Do use it and make your life simpler!

Posted by Mukul Vinay Lele at 7:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Captivate,cp files disappearing,e-learning

Some Captivate 3 users have faced a strange and unfortunate problem of .cp file suddenly disappearing after saving and closing the captivate. A possible reason for this has been analyzed and fixed in Captivate 4.

However for the Captivate 3 users I can suggest a possible workaround to recover the project. If this problem happens, immediately look for a .tmp file (after closing Captivate) in the same folder where your .cp file was supposed to be. If you are able to find this then you are lucky - Rename this file to .cp and you can continue working then on. You might also notice in certain cases, that this .tmp file is much larger size than the original .cp file. This is but nothing to worry - next save on the renamed file will reduce this size back to normal.

Posted by Sony Kadavan at 9:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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)