The eLearning Guild published a new eBook:
239 Tips for Producing and Managing
Flash-based e-Learning Content.
It includes several pages of Adobe Captivate and general best practice tips - all submitted by users like you.
It's free!
Robe Rode, who I met recently at a conference when he was presenting on Adobe Presenter, just started his blog and offers some great tips on integrating Adobe Captivate content in Adobe Presenter.
At the Annual Gathering of the eLearning Guild we have received lots of feature ideas and feedback. Our product sessions were packed and we had several members from our team in India here. They were conducting focus group sessions with attendees to get feedback about our ideas on Adobe Captivate 4 (I'll let you know through the blog, when the beta starts - will still be a while).
As promised, you can access my slides from the session at Session 410 Tips & Tricks Slides. (FYI: Some of the links are 'broken' because they go to files on my computer). A SWF sample is also included in one of the slides playing inside the presentation.
I guess our Tips & Tricks session made an impression - Check out Will Thalheimer's blog about the session - blogs like this make my day :)
At the session, we showed the new RoboHelp packager for AIR - imagine you can create a professional looking, standalone performance support system that:
Adobe AIR is quite amazing and recommend taking a closer look at it for eLearning.
Talking about AIR - I stopped by Brent Schlenker's session Scanning the Globe: Connecting your digital world to the world around you that focused on QR codes. One of the attendees pointed out the free QR code generator built in AIR.
So, here is a secret message - whoever comments first what is hidden in the QR code will receive a USB stick from me (please include your address/contact info in the comment) - my phone unfortunately is not yet supported and I don't have a reader on it, so I couldn't test this code ... I hope it works for you ;)
PS: The presentation slides are published via Adobe Presenter - it plugs in to PowerPoint to convert your slides to a very nice and quick loading Flash-based online experience.
I just returned from Seattle where we had a great Captivate user group meeting last night. I promised to make my slides available. This is a bit of a sneak peek for my session I'll deliver at the eLearning Guild Annual Gathering next week.
Thanks again to Mark and Matt for organizing the event. And thanks Bobby for attending and providing support :)
The questions and discussions at the end were great. By the way - the Pizza was really good!
PS: The presentation is published via Adobe Presenter - it plugs in to PowerPoint to convert your slides to a very nice and quick loading Flash-based online experience.
I'll be in Seattle on April 9th and will meet the Adobe Captivate user group. If you are in the area, please stop by. I'll also be presenting tips & tricks. More details to come on the Adobe Captivate user group website.
The pipwerks blog has a great Adobe Captivate tip using the variable rdcmndHidePlaybar to toggle the playback controls off/on. The blog entry also includes the link to the online help which contains a list of most variables.
A reader of the Tip: Splitting and chaining large projects had a question on how to package all the split files together to enable tracking inside the LMS.
You might want to try the Reload Metadata Tool for SCORM 2004 that is mentioned on Tom King's blog Mobilemind or the newer "Eclipse IDE-based" version.
Thanks B.J. for the tip:
I'd recommend using Trident to create, manage, and publish SCOs. I've had good luck with it...
Check out this great guide on splitting large projects and linking them together.
A user recently emailed me about this one:
How do you change the numbering for the answers in quiz slides?
A relatively simple workaround is mentioned in the online forum - add a space and change the size to 0 or add a slim character like a . or i and change the text color to the background color of your slide.
Read the entire forum entry on changing quiz answer numbering.
Thanks Andrea H. for sending me the link.
The new re-recording feature in Adobe Captivate enables you to automatically recapture web applications and is usually used for applications that
This feature was very tricky to implement and is in its first version only available for IE6 and limited to HTML-based web applications. It basically creates a script, like a macro in Word, of what you are doing in the web application.
Here are the steps on how to use it:
Now imagine, your engineers have renamed a field in the application or added new features, you can simply rerecord automatically. This also works great for web apps that can change the language on the fly (like some SAP apps). Simply start a new project and let Adobe Captivate do the work:
PS: To set up your browser at exactly the same size every time, do this:
We recently received the question on how to give the viewer control over starting demo playback. This is especially important if you have multiple demos on a single HTML page or in a blog - by default, they would all start at the same time. I personally like graying out the background and placing a button in the center. Here is a little demo on how I did it. The steps are very simple :)
A couple of days ago I received this comment:
I'd like to see some workarounds for using the tab key inside a captivate project running on the web. Many times the browser steals back the Tab keyPress and it becomes non functional in the applications.
Our QA manager Suresh has provided a simple workaround:
There is a behavior called Seamless tabbing, which allows tabbing to extend beyond the movie and start with the browser address bar. To disable, follow these steps:
Your tabbing will now stay within the movie. I tested this for both IE and FF and it works.
The new article on including animated and interactive .SWF files into PDF documents is now published on the Developer Center: Adding Adobe Captivate movie clips to a PDF file.
Thanks Jeff for writing this article!
We are constantly publishing new articles in our Adobe Captivate Developer Center - a place where you can access free articles with step-by-step how to instructions. The latest include:
Publishing Adobe Captivate files to YouTube and Using animations to extend Adobe Captivate for right-click capability. The next article to be published will show you how to insert Adobe Captivate SWF files into an Acrobat PDF file - did you know that you can even do that? Imagine a visual demo inside your PDF!
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The eLearning Guild is planning a new eBook on Tips for Producing and Managing Flash-based e-Learning Content and they are looking for tip submissions. Here is your chance to share your Adobe Captivate tips with your peers.
Simply submit your Tips for Producing and Managing Flash-based e-Learning Content via the eLearning Guild website.
PS: Feel free to use any of the tips you find in my blog :)
Shane Matthews, who I met at the Breakfast Bite session at DevLearn, followed up with a picture and some info on his portable recording booth he uses with SMEs to record audio narration for Adobe Captivate projects. From Shane:
Attached is a photo of the first iteration - I've since updated with a small desktop stand to hold the microphone, rather than the boom stand. I'll send another image when I get back home.
It was pretty simple to build … take a small collapsible clothes hamper, which you can buy at any Wal-Mart, and line it with acoustic foam. In my case I got the foam from a local company who had recently built a recording studio and had some left over. I didn't even spend money on a pop-filter … I just made one with a hanger and a pair of nylons (not mine <grin>). By then it was a matter of principle to do it cheaply - ha! The microphone is a condenser microphone I had, which is best for capturing vocal audio.
The result? I have a "quick and dirty" portable studio that I can bring to an SME if need be. It prevents any unwanted background noise (within reason) and any echoes from flat surfaces.
Thanks for following up! This is a great idea.
The Adobe Summit today was kicked off by Ellen's keynote with Naresh Gupta , our SVP, calling in from India in the middle of the night on a holiday! It was a great start of a very special conference to us since it's the first eLearning Conference that Adobe is holding.
Ellen also showed a video of our customers talking about our tools - Watch the video.
The Adobe Captivate Tips & Tricks session was quite packed and I was lucky to have RJ Jacquez join us, the Technical Communication Suite and eLearning evangelist. I learned quite a bit from his part of the presentation. Not covered in the PPT is his tip on changing the standard.htm file (found in C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Captivate 3\Templates\Publish) which changes your published HTML file. I'll ask him to start a blog to explain it.
RoboHelp and FrameMaker are great tools for eLearning and several people were asking about the eseminars we offer - I recommend: Bring your Information to Life with 3D and Adobe® Captivate® 3 in the new Technical Communication Suite! - it's free, it's live and RJ will be presenting.
Right now I am in the executive panel session on technology road maps and it looks like attendees are interested in Flash Lite output (mobile important for about 5-7 ppl), standards support, video (1/3rd in the room develop video and several people want to do more than 50% of their content as video), a YouTube Learning type site (I rather would personally see a service like Adobe Share to turn into that - Share has the benefit of supporting interactive content so I think it's a bit more practical than a pure video service), collaboration (important for all).
Heading off to our reception ...
PS: If you leave a comment, please include a real name/address.
If you have links to URLs in your Adobe Captivate project, you can easily set them up to open in a new window and even choose if the slide should continue playing after the click or not - simply click on the little triangle next to the URL.
Our team has made a little nifty utility available to edit Full Motion Recording slides. FMR slides are generated during drag/drop actions or when you record in full motion recording mode - it's similar to .avi-based recording except we generate a .swf on the fly. However, .swf files can typically not be edited inside Adobe Captivate. You can delete, split, and insert .swf files.
Simply export the .swf of such a slide (use the library) and edit with the FMR editor. Subrahmanya wrote a Dev Center article on how to use the utility.
Download the FMR editor from the Dev Center.
We have added some new caption styles in Adobe Captivate 3 and moved some of the older styles into another folder called More. If for some reason, the caption styles don't show up for selection in the caption style drop down box, you might have to change the .fcm to .FCM in this folder C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Captivate 3\Gallery\Captions\More.
Thanks to Rick Stone for the tip :)
In seminars and customer meetings, the question on what mic to use keeps coming up. I am not an audio expert so you definitely want to do some research if CD quality is required. Usually, if I need high quality, I just go to a local recording studio. The hour there including editing is only around $50 and the quality is perfect, 
since the room is sound proof and they work with $30k plus equipment. In most cases though, I just use a very simple and cheap unidirectional mic or my Plantronics headset. They do the job in 99% of the projects.
A friend of mine has been using Blue Snowball USB mic to record the SMEs who think it's really cool because it has a bit of a retro look. This is an omni-directional mic, meaning, it will record audio from all directions including ambient noise. A quiet or soundproof room will give you best results. You might also want to invest in a Pop-Filter. They are cheap and worth it.
For audio editing, you might want to take a look at Adobe Soundbooth to have additional functionality such as noise or hiss reduction, audio filters, and effects. You can also easily compose music scores :)
Here is another tip from my friend: Get some kind of percussion instrument to create a sound you can easily recognize in the visual wave format. That way, you know exactly when to cut the audio between slides. When her SMEs mess up, she simply hits it twice to quickly find the second take.
Adobe Captivate 3 generates multiple output files. These files are all published into a single folder and typically contain the HTML file, the actual content SWF, the playback control SWF and possibly a JavaScript file and now some more with the new version. Here are some tips of what to do to generate a single SWF:
There might be more - I'll keep updating this list.
Adobe Captivate 3 is now shipping and our Developer Center is now live with 4 new articles:
If you have any tips/tricks to share, please let us know - we are always looking for authors for our developer center.
I just saw a request from a customer regarding displaying slide numbers without having to manually create a caption which then has to be manually updated every time you insert/delete a slide. Adobe Captivate supports the insertion of SWF files and you can do all kinds of things using this functionality. One of our Community Experts, Paul Dewhurst, has a great site with such a SWF: frame number display. Paul, like most of our active Advisory Board members, has been with the product since RoboDemo days in 2002/2003. Don't miss the many other downloads and tips on his site RaisingAimee.
In addition to Paul's great site, check out some sites from our other board members for further tips and tricks:
Larry Walther http://www.captivate-tips.com PS: Larry has used pedagogical agents in his content long before the snazzy SWF or FLV based characters were available - he used to use the Microsoft Agents. He is currently working on his site and has a character telling you that :)
Rick Stone http://www.robowizard.com (check out his tips & tricks CHM)
Mark Fletcher http://macrofireball.blogspot.com/
Kevin Siegel http://iconlogic.blogs.com/weblog/
John Daigle www.showmethedemo.com
Who am I missing? Please comment and I add your link. I don't have a blog roll or I would add all these links on the side bar ...
This keeps coming up - Adobe Captivate content needs to be integrated with a tool that can only handle one SWF file. In version 2, we introduced skins with borders to enable playback controls to be placed outside of your content. This functionality is turned on by default but generates two SWF files.
To only publish a single SWF, simply uncheck Boders in the Skins dialog (You get to this dialog from the Publish dialog or the Project menu).
It's pretty easy to do targeted feedback in Adobe Captivate. Simply use multiple click boxes within one slide. The click boxes are overlayed, offer only 1 attempt and are set to continue on incorrect clicks. On the correct click, they jump to the next slide. That way you can provide different levels of messages to your learners.
You can go a step beyond and also include some clickboxes with no action assigned but a success message. Change the look and feel of the message to look like a failure message and include specific feedback.
Here is an example - have fun.
I had a customer meeting today where the question on controlling Adobe Captivate content inside an Adobe Presenter PPT presentation came up. This option is already available in Adobe Presenter :)
Publish your content without the playback controls from within Adobe Captivate (uncheck playbar in the skins options available via the publish dialog) and insert the SWF file into the slide using the Presenter PowerPoint plugin. Then check "Controlled by presentation playbar" in the Presentation Settings.
Or read the developer center article for more detail.
Hope this helps.
