adobe captivate on mac ???

one of the advantages of twitter is that it gives you instant feedback of the product unlike blogs which is a thought over thing. tweets are as the first thought that came to your mind on the topic. I have been following Adobe Captivate on twitter recently and it is buzzing about adobe captivate on mac. I could not help myself a bit of researching on net to find what are the information about captivate on mac platform.

• found this petitiononline petition for captivate on mac request.
• probably one of the most commented blog on this topic
• as the name indicates www.captivate4mac.com – a website dedicated to this request though not much activity
• a blog post by one of the mac users on how to run captivate on mac in virtual XP environment
• and a recent blog post on the same topic by a captivate users

and here are some of the reactions on facebook

 

Update 1 – 11th May 2009 - Read the announcement of Adobe Captivate on mac here. Follow the instructions to join the prerelease program if you are interested.

path of sun from my room…

i did not expected that these will come but here is a pair of pomegranate fruits which are growing up in my balcony.

and here are few pictures I took at almost same time when the sun rises in morning in last 3 months to show how sun moved from just visible to fully visible from my room -

election time – resources for bangalore voters…

Hyderabad was the first city to go to polls among indian metros and young people were not lazy to vote this time. Read here. This can be attrubuted to various awareness campaigns going on and tv ads like this .

23rd is election time in Bangalore and offices are closed so hoping the trend will continue. Below are some of the resources for bangalore voters.

• How to find if your name is included in electoral rolls – Search here – the pincode is of the area where you live
• How to find where you need to go for voting – Click here
• Can you vote if you dont have voters ID card but your name is in the list – Yes keep the documents like PAN card, Driving license, Passpost for identification proof
• Click here, here , google portal for election, one billion voters – for few more information

the whole elections process looks normal to us but consider the preparation the authorities do in order to give us this option to choose our representative. Some interesting facts about the first phase of polling that began on April 16, 2009.

Update 1 – Did I vote – no – feeling guilty – tried my best to find my polling booth using election commission helpline and other nos including just dial from 9 o clock in morning to 12 o clock, then gave up. The website that I have marked for me failed me as my residence was at the border of its marked boundaries so it did not had data or me.

prezi – what your presentation tool could be like…

slideshows or presentations are one of the most widely form of data being presented to users. It shows set of data at a time and moves from one set to another.They are linear in behaviour. But our mind does not see information in straight way.It tries to get a whole picture of things first then see the individual parts and then fits it in the whole picture. He can move in any order between data. If it is more interested in anything he can spend more time on those things.

Current presentation methods are like a set of inormation and you have to fit them to complete the puzzle. You get answer at the end. Though most of the time you wanted answer at the begining. What would a presentation tool be like which matches how the mind sees the information. It shows you the big picture , allows you to move between them while showing the relationship between them and if you like it go to details.

came across this online presentation tool – prezi which is trying to do exactly this. It is completely different presentation tool than what we are used to till date. See it to believe it. Here are some of the presentations created using this. See one of those here. And below is a clip to show how to make prezi presentations.

one of the similar features have been tried with pptplex which is on microsot office labs. But compare the difference. the idea is similar but prezi contents are so stunning that it is next immediate thing you would want to try or atleast want to show others.

one of the theories of eLearning is that there should not be much distractions in the content. It should not be so stunning that it creates hindrance in learning. This is exactly what I felt about this. I liked it , I saw many presentations created in this later on realised that none of the time I was looking at the content. But I do remember all the visual effects it has. The editor is also high on visual appeal , sometimes I wished if there was better way to use the all purpose tool they show is their logo also – It takes so many clicks. These are the only downside I could think of…

tata nano – not just a car

just got a glimpse of the tata motor nano – the $2000 car. I am not a automobile lover but first glimpse could not stop looking at it. And thinking that a parking lot in bangalore would cost more than this car. It could have been passed as normal car or even a better one. By no standard it looks as a cheap car but the one which every one would want to have. It is just the price which makes as if every one could afford to have, though I have no such plans.

Here are some of the photos which I clicked. This is where you keep your tyres and not engines.

Engine is at back side -

And some of the ways Tata is using to keep the marketing cost down, click the image below to go to their site -

• its official site is promoting presence on forums, blogs, facebook, orkut
• there are many videos which are hosted on youtube and the website embeds them.
• it allows you to book online
• and you would not miss seeing this as it is displayed at all tata retail stores like westside, croma etc and any shopping you do at their stores allows you to fill up coupons and participate in lucky draw to win a nano.

The only downside is that it has potential to nullify the goods that electric cars are doing for future.

ribbit voice platform or flash developers

Further to my earlier post on ribbit here are summary -

Features – visit this for complete feature set – ribbit has whole set of APIs like you can create a flash application which can accept or make calls. The calls can be to actual phones or your flash application to which Ribbit assigns a number which uses your computer microphone and speaker to act as fully functional phone. Most interesting part is that depending on who is calling and other parameters like time, or any other condition you can think of in your code you can execute a programatic event. Of course it could be limited by what can be done from Flash.So things like remote controlling the content playing in class from my mobile phone could be possible. Or switch off my fridge connected to flash device by making a phone call should be possible. You can create applications that can send text messages to either your ribbit phone or any number in US. Other features are transcription services that is you can convert your voice messages to text.

Is it all free – no. But if you have developer account you can do many of the things for free. Developer account are given access to dial anywhere in US for free. I tried my hands on building a quick application using this to call someone in US and save my bills but in my first attempt could not do it. Will give it a try later on again in few days. From discussions in forums here are the limits for a developer account- 10 calls per day (US Only) – 10 minutes per call – 10 text SMS messages per day (US Only) – 10 sub-accounts – 0 voicemail transcriptions (unless requested). But going through the forums looks like even if you exceed this limit for the time being they are fine.

There are two stages of trying out ribbit – when you are building the application is when it is considered developer account and when the application goes live. The pricing comes into picture after application goes live.

Scenarios – first thought here are the scenarios I can think of for eLearning. There are nothing which cannot be done by some of the existing methods except that it brings so much fun to the learning.

• I create a eLearning course. The course has a “give me more ideas” button which is actually a ribbit appliation. Distribute it to my groups from whom I want more feedback. There could be 2 stages of my course completion – I have created a draft version and I have lot of time on my hand. In that mode if someone clicks “give me more ideas” then he would be routed to voice mail where he can leave his voice message. The transcription would come into action by converting the message to speech and sending me report at the end of day which I can incorporate into my course. Next stage is when I need the comments urgently in which case it would be a direct call to my mobile. At this stage I can incorporate their comments quickly.
• Similar situation could be I create a course and I put “answer this question” button which would accept calls from only a fixed set of numbers. This could be achieved by programatically analysing the caller ID which would be maintained in a database. Further on they could be given password to speak. If it matches then the voice is sent for transcription and I can test and rate their answers. Otherwise call is not accepted. And my application can be programed to analyse the responses also and send SMS to the course takers about whether they passed or failed. This could be very relevant scenario for mobile learning.
• Or the simplest of them is make a call or send text message to my friend using the eLearning course and have fun.

With some free talk and text time for developer accounts I would go and try out some of the features. And use Adobe Captivate 4 widget framework to create some working widgets.

help files for widgets in adobe captivate 4…

if you are thinking of creating widgets in Adobe Captivate 4 the help files contain very relevant information. and they are very concise so it is good idea to go through them once so that you can get a feeling of where to search for when in problem.

I am listing below the links for reference. You can add comments to the online help also if you feel that you can add anything more or if the information is partial/wrong etc - 

• about widgets – brief on widgets.
• type of widgets – it contains brief on static widgets ,  interactive widgets and question widgets with some examples on how to use the ones included in product.
• widget panel – this is the panel which lists few of the available widgets in product
• linked widgets – how you can specify dependent files for widgets.
• create widgets – basics of creating widgets.
• defining visibility modes for widgets
• using xml in widgets – xml is the format in which data is passed from Captivate to widget 
• using variables in widgets – how you can use captivate variables inside widgets.
• action script 3 in widgets – basics of action script 3 wrt widgets
• access adobe captivate movie properties
• question widgets – few extra functions for question widgets for LMS support. For AS3 you need to add these to the question template Adobe Captivate generates automatically. AS2 works as it is not very strict so even if it does not finds these functions it continues.
• add widgets – tells the workflows you can use to insert widget in your captivate files.
• troubleshoot widgets – how to locate the problem while developing widgets.  

use voice 2.0 in your eLearning projects…

collaboration is new way of learning. We already know how chats and social networks are helping in this. It is all fun but everyone has to find their own way to learn, there is less flow and pattern. In most of cases one has to reinvent the wheel. Can there be a better way in which the learning flow can be decided by the content creator and he can pass on the knowledge to the learners. The learners still use all the fun things of web 2.0 world.

Since my world revolves around Adobe Captivate so my thought goes on to the ways in which we can use Adobe Captivate for this. In my view it can help by creating content which controls the flow of learning and all web 2.0 and collaboration is initiated, contained, guided, tracked and stopped by it. We have seen some example in form of youtube and google map widgets wherin we could use them inside Adobe Captivate content. And the content is restricted in terms of the information which is visible to users but more engaging and in the form they are comfortable. 

in view of all this one news caught my attention – this month ribbit opened itself to flash developers. According to them they help to ”integrate voice and rich communication features into your website, application or community”. It means that you can add voice and telephony related features to your your flash content which includes eLearning content created by Adobe Captivate. It includes sms and transcription features. And with widgets feature of Adobe Captivate it is better poised to take advantage of the things happening. 

next two post we will see few scenarios wherin Adobe Captivate users can use it to add voice and sms collaboration features to their content and go through a tutorial to use ribbit APIs for flash .

twitter – the only thing getting attention

looks like twitter is the only thing that is getting attention if you are following technology trends now a days. Be it television or web suddenly everyone has started talking about it. Some report shows that 5 year students are using twitter as a way to learn maths and soon it will be part of curriculam in schools.

here is a gartner report on how enterprises are using twitter. it says “By 2011, Enterprise Microblogging Will Be a Standard Feature on 80 Percent of Social Software Platforms” and probably a way to earn money through this medium. Enterprises are using twitter in following ways - 

• Direct — The company uses Twitter as a marketing or public relations channel
• Indirect — The company’s employees use Twitter to enhance and extend their personal reputations, thereby enhancing the company’s reputation
• Internal — Employees use the platform to communicate about what they are doing, projects they are working on and ideas that occur to them
• and as inbound signalling - Twitter streams provide a rich source of information about what customers, competitors and others are saying about a company.

I have also jumped to twitter bandwagon after watching it from sidelines since almost 2 years. I use twitter to broadcast any interesting piece of news I come across internet. It is faster than blogging about it. If I can add any contribution to the news then I think about blogging it.

wordpress has also released its twitter widget today – read it here which I have added for this blog. Look at right hand side for my twitter feeds. You can add as many twitter widget as you want if you have more than one twitter page. And the links are fully functional…

software project estimation – is it an art …

there are many methods to estimate a software project. All of them contain sufficiently large literature and complex formulaes .If one has to refer  it quickly it cannot be done and even if that is done one will never get so much data as to predict it accurately and in the manner they are saying. so will it always be art.

and here is a link which explains estimating a project using “use cases”. Use cases in any form are the starting point for any project discussions. So it can also be used for creating estimates. Thought this assumes that the use cases are very detailed and lot of thought should go into many other factors as well. Every project is different which may or may not have so much data but the point is in being aware of the fact that use case alongwith few factors can help in estimating effort for a project. And the actual data can be arrived using whatever information is available for a project.

ps – i am using presentation from slideshare in this post. They have just released mobile version of slideshare. Read it here. And it looks like this product was developed during Yahoo Open hack day in bangalore. Read it here.