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.

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…

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 .

use professional quality images in your eLearning projects…

you are creating a eLearning course and you are on lookout for some professional images. Your course material could be targeted for different segments – it might be for distribution to the students of your class or might be for commercial purposes.

Flickr is a great service where amateurs and professionals upload their photographs which are undoubtedly in most cases of very good quality. Most of them are copyrighted images so you cannot use them legally in your content unless it belongs to you but many are under creative commons license  . Creative Commons is a non-profit organization devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. 

1 – > How to search for creative common licensed images on Flickr?

Use this link.

2 – > How to find which license is right for you?

Here is a wizard to help you.

 

And if you are using others images why not think about sharing your images on flickr under creative common license – use this link to mark your photostream under creative commons license.

use google maps in your adobe captivate projects…

there are many eLearning projects with addresses and contact information. How would that look if we can insert a live map which will show a note about the address , can show directions to reach and user can pan,zoom and use it as he would do in any online map services and all within the Captivate project. No need to go to the browser and break the flow of users.

in this post we will go through some of the resources to use Adobe Flash CS4 to create a swf file which can be used inside adobe captivate projects. We will use Google maps Api to achieve this.

1. Set up your development environment in Flash CS4. Read the whole process here.
2. Sign up for google map API here. You will get a unique API key. You will need to specify a website or domain where you will be using it. You can give the link to your blogs also. Refer to step 10 as to how to use it.
3. go through this post to create a simple application here. Note – The path for componets in Flash CS4 is C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Flash CS4\Common\Configuration\Components
4. Now we will create a swf file which will display the map of washington and show a overlay over that.
5. Open Flash CS4. Create a Action Script 3.0 project
6. During step number 1 you have copied maps swc file to Flash directory. If you have done it correctly than inside components window you can see and entry for “Google>GoogleMapsLibrary”. Drag drop it to stage. Dont worry about the position.
7. The code is attached at the end of post for reference. Just copy the code to actionscript window and publish the project as swf file.
8. In the begining of code we have use few import statements so that we can use the corresponding APIs.
9. We will declare the map object - var map:Map = new Map();
10. We will need to use the API key we generated in step 2. - map.key = “put the api key here“;
11. Set the size of map - map.setSize(new Point(500, 400));
12. add a event listener - map.addEventListener(MapEvent.MAP_READY, onMapReady);
13. set the map area to the location you want to show – map.setCenter(new LatLng(38.8977, -77.0366), 14, MapType.NORMAL_MAP_TYPE); – Important thing are lattitude(38.8977) and longitude(-77.0366) – how should you find the one for your location – there are 3 ways – you know it already, use google geocoding apis  or use this page to find the one for your location. Behind the scenes it is using google map apis to do this.
14. Play with replacing MapType.NORMAL_MAP_TYPE - Other values they can take are SATELLITE_MAP_TYPE, HYBRID_MAP_TYPE, and PHYSICAL_MAP_TYPE. SATELLITE_MAP_TYPE is the one you can use to get google earth type of map.
15. Next we will create a marker and add it over the map. It will show your position on map
16. Below is the action script code . Put it in your action script window and you are ready to go.

import com.google.maps.LatLng;

import com.google.maps.Map;

import com.google.maps.MapEvent;

import com.google.maps.MapType;

import com.google.maps.overlays.Marker;

import com.google.maps.overlays.MarkerOptions;

import com.google.maps.MapType;

import com.google.maps.LatLng;

import com.google.maps.styles.FillStyle;

import com.google.maps.styles.StrokeStyle;

//create a map object

var map:Map = new Map();

//specify the API key

map.key = “replace with your API key“;

//set the size of map

map.setSize(new Point(500, 400));

//add event listeners

map.addEventListener(MapEvent.MAP_READY, onMapReady);

this.addChild(map);

function onMapReady(event:Event):void {

//center the map to the lat, long

map.setCenter(new LatLng(38.8977, -77.0366), 14, MapType.NORMAL_MAP_TYPE);

//create a marker

         var markerA:Marker = new Marker(

             new LatLng(38.8977, -77.0366),

             new MarkerOptions({

                 strokeStyle: new StrokeStyle({color: 0×987654}),

                 fillStyle: new FillStyle({color: 0×223344, alpha: 1}),

                 radius: 15,

                 hasShadow: true

             })

         );

//add the marker to the map

map.addOverlay(markerA);

}

Publish it as swf and insert it to your Captivate project. Note – This is action script 3.0 swf so you can use it in Latest version of Adobe Captivate that is 4 . Publish the Captivate project. You have a fully functional map showing the location you provided. You can pan , go to any place in world . Find the directions etc. 

Keep an eye here for the future post to understand how widget feature of Adobe Captivate 4 gives a better solution than this. And use the endless capabilities of Google Maps service.

Update  - read this post to see how the google map widgets were created and download the file to be used with Adobe Captivate 4.

adobe captivate 4, learning 2.0 and the perpetual beta …..

while browsing the net for using various webservices like youtube,flickr,google maps etc and thinking how they are being used in eLearning world I chanced upon this ebook. I was late to notice this but still. The concept is called “e learning 2.0” and is explained as use of web technologies in education. This term is extension of more famous term web 2.0.

I am also thinking of how a eLearning tool like Adobe Captivate 4 can help in this phenomenon. You have already seen how youtube videos can be inserted in adobe captivate 4 slides. That was just the glimpse. More advanced things can be done like posting the comment, adding the rating, complains etc depending on how much they open for Flash. Similarly there could be ways to use flickr which is a photoshare service. Learning 2.0 also mentions it quite frequently but I am yet to find a broad use case in which a tool can help in creating content using Flickr. Ofcourse showing a set of photographs with predefined search string is the easiest of them but I am not sure if it will be used or practical courses. May be it is my ignorance of service which I have just began to use or may be the informal nature of these services. There are some interesting things which can be done with google maps which I will share shortly.

And this also reminds me one of the favourite terms of web 2.0 – perpetual beta which is a system in which a product never leaves development stage of beta and allows developers to consistently release new features which might not be fully tested. You see this trend in the “beta” logo which comes with many web 2.0 services. This also says users must be treated as co developers and they add to the product feature set also. Which again leaves me with thought that the features will never stop coming even after Adobe Captivate 4 is released and the users can be part of it also by developing such services on the tool. This is one of the contribution of Adobe Captivate to web 2.0 phenomenon.

adobe captivate 4 is released…

Adobe Captivate 4 is released to public. You can read about the pricing details, feature set and videos here

It seems yesterday that Adobe Captivate 3 was released.  Here are my four favourite features to justify a upgrade -

Enhance content - For end users most of the appeal comes in how the content looks. And most of us ended up going to other products to spruce up our content and present it in better way. Now all of this could be done with aggregator and Table of content feature.

 

 

 

Extend content - Most of us used Captivate since long and were almost stuck somewhere about its abilities. We wished some new type of objects or questions could be there. We wished to extend Captivate. Now with Widgets we can create any new type of object, question slides, new buttons etc and it will all follow all the the rules inside Captivate like responding to success/failure, participating in quizzes , adhering to LMS etc. With this probably we would never need to file a enhancement report to Captivate. And with variables and scripting I am yet to gauge fully its power in controlling the content yet following all the business logic of Captivate and eLearning.

 

Collaborate for content- In a large organization we needed to get inputs from various stakeholders about the content we created. Now we have Adobe Captivate commenting feature. Try it out to see the time it saves and the value it brings. If none of these are interesting we could just distribute the file for viewing. It looks so good that people will not stop seeing it.
 

 

 

 

Reuse content - And who says flash based tools are needed for creating e learning courses. Most of us had content in PowerPoint and though Captivate provided a way to insert them inside Captivate file we still needed to go back and forth between applications if we wanted to modify content. Now we can work on PowerPoint content from within Captivate.

And these are just part of complete feature set. Keep an eye on these spaces for more information on these features in coming days.

use youtube videos inside adobe captivate

for Adobe Captivate 3 users one of the wishes would be how can they insert youtube videos inside their Captivate project file. Here are the ways you can do it.

• this is based on the documentation YouTube ActionScript 2.0 Player API Reference. Visit this page for some more guidelines about using it for loading multiple videos and unloading etc.
• Open a flash actionscript 2.0 file. Copy the code from the page mentioned  above under the example section and paste to the flash file you have just created. Make following changes -
  1. var ytplayer:MovieClip = _root.createEmptyMovieClip(“ytplayer”, 1);
     change this line to var ytplayer:MovieClip =  createEmptyMovieClip(“ytplayer”, 1); as captivate gives warning about using _root in the swf being inserted.
  2. go to www.youtube.com and locate the video you want to insert into Captivate project file.
  3. locate the url of that video – it will be in format of http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=SaBb8Wi25Pg
  4. copy the text marked in red – it uniquely identifies  the video on youtube
  5. switch to your actionscript code
  6. Replace the text copied in earlier step 4 with VIDEO_ID in the statement ytPlayerLoader.loadClip(“http://www.youtube.com/v/VIDEO_ID“, ytplayer);
  7. Save the flash file. Publish it to swf. For best results change the document size of flash to 480 x 385 pixels
  8. Open Captivate. Choose Insert – > Animation . Locate the swf file you published in previous step 7 and insert it.
  9. Now insert a button on the same slide so that Captivate movie will pause at that slide till the time user clicks. So that they can view the video before moving to next slide.
  10. Publish the Captivate project and you will see and can play the video

Pros -

• totally seamless
• you need not use those tools to download video files from youtube to your machine and probably face copyright issue
• no copyright issue as video is being played from youtube site

Cons -

• You have to manually specify the video ID and regenerate swf before using it in captivate.
• this is just a proof of concept. It has many bugs like audio not stopping when you move to next slide, video in some stage when you rewind to the slide containing it and possibly many more. But it is all possible by changing the actionscript code by unloading the video properly.
• you have to add button for slide to pause

ps : watch out for next posts -

• use flickr apis to create slideshows which fetches data from flickr. Use Flash to create the animation which can be used inside captivate.
• some improvemets on youtube sample
• and wait you have a better and elegant solution waiting when Adobe Captivate 4 is released. Update 1 - read step by step guide to create youtube widget for Adobe Captivate 4

adobe captivate in news and some resources …

an interview about Adobe Captivate 3. watch the video -

watch the demo created in Adobe Captivate explaining how to use Adobe AIR extension for Dreamweaver CS3. This extension is about offline blogging client. How easy it is to convert existing projects to AIR application !

collection of online tutorials to learn Adobe Captivate 2. Much of this is still valid for latest version so still very useful.

learn about new features of Adobe Captivate 3 here. This blog is updated weekly and great place to know about Adobe Captivate and some other applications like RoboHelp etc.

adobe Captivate exchange where few games created using adobe captivate has been uploaded recently.