adobe captivate 5 is released for windows and mac…

finally it is out of door. Read here.

to help you in deciding whether you should go for this or not adobe has done independent study on how much time you can save. They compared doing similar tasks in Adobe Captivate 5 with previous version. For ex – you can now create software simulation 39% faster. Read this pdf to know the details.

here are my other reasons why anyone should consider buying the latest version of Adobe Captivate.

• It works both on windows and mac. Captivate behaves exactly same on both platforms. The content created are also same and can be used interchangeably on both platforms without any worry. So no more workaround of “running vm on mac for using it” and reasonings like “captivate is the only reason I need a window machine”.
• You can open multiple files at same time and work across them. Seems a basic feature but for captivate users this has been long missed feature. And in real life projects this will be the first thing you will notice.
• almost no dialogs. Most of them are now PI which are more familiar to anyone coming from a Creative suite perspective. And the overall user interface is no learning curve for someone coming from other adobe applications.
• if you though adobe flash should have screen capture – see this functionality in eLearning suite 2.0.

There are many new features which you will appreciate. Some of them are

• Optimized user interface
• Object Styles
• Master Slides
• Rich animation effects if you always wanted captivate to be closer to flash in terms of rich effects
• Multivideo support and synchronization
• Tracking and reporting if you were intimated by various lms and your clients did not have one and still you wanted the functionality.

besides this there are multiple small nuggets which you will notice while working on this.

PS – if anyone follows this blog they can roughly guess the timeframe of captivate release by looking at the frequency of posts. Before the release it starts warming up, after release the frequency increases and in between release it almost dies down.

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 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: 0x987654}),

                 fillStyle: new FillStyle({color: 0x223344, 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.

introduction to Adobe Captivate 4 widgets

read an introductory post on “widgets” in adobe captivate 4 at Captivate Team weblog

More posts will follow…

update – 

• read a post for using youtube videos in your adobe captivate projects
• introduction to adobe captivate widgets
• read step by step guide to create youtube widget for Adobe Captivate 4
• read a post for using google maps in your adobe captivate projects
• read a post on how to create google map widget which can be used with Adobe Captivate 4. download the files also.
• here are links to complete help files for widgets in Adobe Captivate 4

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.