Adobe Captivate 4 – 1 month evaluation.

I have been using Adobe Captivate 4 on a more or less daily basis since it’s release on January 20th.

One of the things I really love with Adobe Captivate 4 is the speed. In Adobe Captivate 2 & 4 you often had to wait several seconds after clicking on an action until something happened.  Now with Adobe Captivate 4 everything goes quickly and smoothly and that is really something you can feel when you work with Adobe Captivate all day.

The second thing I really like with Captivate is the ability to included external flash animations into the Adobe Captivate SWF file when publishing.  It works really well and eliminates a lot of the problems you could encounter with Adobe Captivate 3 and external content. Complex Flash animations/components still need to be published seperatly on some occasions, but in my experience approximatly 90% of all the external resources I used can easily be integrated into the Adobe Captivate swf when publishing.

The third thing which I find extremely useful is the reviewing feature. It’s brilliant when you are working on project with multiple stakeholders it’s very useful and userfriendly to send the project for review like this. The only downside is that the reviewer application is a separate program that need to be installed on the users computer. If you work with big companies or cooperations chances are that most of the users don’t have admin priviliges and therefore need to involve their IT-department in order to install the application.

Now to the downsides of Adobe Captivate 4.

The audio part of Adobe Captivate 4 is terrible. I have a course produced in Adobe Captivate 3, which contains a lot of speak in the form of MP3 files. When I converted it to Adobe Captivate 4 the sound quality had gone down significantly. I tried to create a new Adobe Captivate 4 project and import the source MP3 files into the project again, but the sound quality is still poor. From what I gather Adobe Captivate 4 uses some form of compression on the imported MP3 files, which compromises the quality. This is a serious issue with Adobe Captivate 4 and if you look at the Adobe forums you can see that a lot of users have the same problem.

For courses which contain audio I’m still using Adobe Captivate 3 and will not be able to use Adobe Captivate 4 until Adobe has fixed this problem.

I urge you to report this problem to Adobe by clicking http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform&product=5

The TOC (Table of Contents) finally got usefull in Adobe Captivate 4. Unfortunately there are some issues with the TOC feature, which reduces the usability. I really like the fact that the user gets a check mark once they have completed a page. However these checkmarks apparantly only appear when a user has watched the entire timeline of that particular slide. I usually construct my courses with my own navigation buttons and these buttons pause before the timeline ends and when clicked they perfom a “go to next page” action. If you use buttons like this (or have any form of branching in your course) then you will never get the check mark in the TOC for those pages.

It’s really too bad because it’ s a great feature – especially for people who doesn’t use an LMS to deliver their Adobe Captivate content.

Some other issues with the TOC feature is the lack of customizability of the TOC and the fact that you need to use the default >> button to open/close it. It would be nice to be able to customize the TOC 100% and then open/close it with a script from your own button in the course.

All in all I’m pleased with Adobe Captivate 4 but I must admit the main thing leading to this is how it’s much much quicker than Adobe Captivate 3. 

I still haven’t explored all the features with user defined variables and customized widgets yet, but I’ll start on that soon.

Youtube widget for Adobe Captivate 4

Just found this post on the Adobe Captivate blog. It shows how you can make a youtube widget and show youtube videos directly in your Captivate projects just be adding the url to the widget parameters. Pretty neat stuff and it’s the first widget I have seen public since Adobe Captivate 4 was launched.

You can find instructions, download the sourcefiles and the finished widget from the link below.

Have fun!

http://blogs.adobe.com/captivate/2009/02/youtube_widget_for_adobe_capti.html

Computer problems

Sorry I haven’t posted anything on the blog or replied to your comments. I have had some major computer problems the last couple of weeks. I finally got the new RAM I needed so now the computer seems to be stable again. I need to do a complete reinstall of everything though but I should be able to do it sometime next week. Once everything is up and running again I’ll start posting again ;o)

Captivate 4 and Elearning suite released!!

It’s finally here… Adobe Captivate 4 has been released and it’s looking very interesting indeed!

You can buy it here:

Adobe Captivate 4 – FullAdobe Captivate 4

Another interesting package is the Elearning suite, which gives you Flash, Photoshop, Dreamweaver etc. with special E-learning functions included.  I’m just sad I just bought the CS4 Web Premium package 1 month ago, because now I probably need to upgrade once again.

Once I have tested Captivate 4 I’ll post some more information on the blog.

Have fun!

Tracking your Captivate projects without an LMS

One of the most common questions I read on forums and blogs is how you can track your Captivate projects if you don’t have an LMS.

There are many different ways of doing this and it also depends on what you want to track. If you want to track which users complete your course, their score, time used etc. then you are looking at a rather complex scenario. You would need to use some databases to store the relevant information in and you would also need the user to input their name / employee number in the beginning of the course. You then need to manipulate Captivate’s email score functionality in order to save it into a database. You can read more about this on Phillips blog here – http://pipwerks.com/journal/2008/09/07/send-captivate-quiz-data-to-javascript/

If you are interested in tracking how many users open your project/course then there is a much simpler approach.

I found a service called MochiBot a while back, which can help you track how many times a particular swf has been viewed. Since Captivate projects essentially are swf’s then you can use this service.

It’s 100% free and extremely simple to setup. It takes 2 minutes to make an account and then you are ready to setup your first Mochibot.

The Mochibot Dashboard

You will need Adobe Flash in order to make these Mochibots since the code used is actionscript. If you don’t have a copy of Adobe Flash you can buy one here or download a free 30-day trial.

Adobe Flash CS4 Professional – Full

Once you are ready click “create your own Mochibot” and enter the name of your project (or whatever you want it to be). Remove the tick in “rank this SWF” if you don’t want the name of your project to be publically viewable.

After that you will receive a code like this:

// MochiBot.com — Version 8
// Tested with with Flash 5-8, ActionScript 1 and 2
function __com_mochibot__(swfid, mc, lv, trk) {
var x,g,s,fv,sb,u,res,mb,mbc,pv; mb = ‘__mochibot__’; mbc = “mochibot.com”; g = _global ? _global : _level0._root; if (g[mb + swfid]) return g[mb + swfid]; s = System.security; x = mc._root['getSWFVersion']; fv = x ? mc.getSWFVersion() : (_global ? 6 : 5); if (!s) s = {}; sb = s['sandboxType']; if (sb == “localWithFile”) return null; x = s['allowDomain']; if (x) s.allowDomain(mbc); x = s['allowInsecureDomain']; if (x) s.allowInsecureDomain(mbc); pv = (fv == 5) ? getVersion() : System.capabilities.version; u = “http://” + mbc + “/my/core.swf?mv=8&fv=” + fv + “&v=” + escape(pv) + “&swfid=” + escape(swfid) + “&l=” + lv + “&f=” + mc + (sb ? “&sb=” + sb : “”) + (trk ? “&t=1″ : “”); lv = (fv > 6) ? mc.getNextHighestDepth() : g[mb + "level"] ? g[mb + "level"] + 1 : lv; g[mb + "level"] = lv; if (fv == 5) { res = “_level” + lv; if (!eval(res)) loadMovieNum(u, lv); } else { res = mc.createEmptyMovieClip(mb + swfid, lv); res.loadMovie(u); } return res;
}
__com_mochibot__(“a44f0eea”, this, 10301, true);

You just copy and paste this into a new flash file and publish it as an swf. Afterwards import the swf into your Captivate project and re-publish. That’s it. Now all you need to do is make your Captivate project available online and you will be able to track the number of views easily.

Detail view of a Mochibot Tracker

You can make as many Mochibot as you like and as always it’s 100% free. I usually make two Mochbots for each project. One on the first page of the project and one on the last page. That way I can see how many people I loose halfway into the course.

Read more about it here:  http://www.mochibot.com

Captivate sub- and superscript

Just thought I would make a quick post about sub- and superscript in Adobe Captivate.

It is not clear from the documentation or the Captivate software itself, how you make sub- and superscript in your textboxes so here is the solution.

To make superscript you mark the relevant text and then click “Ctrl” + “Shift” + “+”.

To make subscript you mark the relevant text and click “Ctrl” + “+”.

The “+” sign need to be the one on your main keyboard – not the one on the numeric keyboard.

If you are using transparent text boxes you need to insert a bullet point in your text caption. This is due to a bug in Adobe Captivate. You can read more about the “power” of the bullet point in this post: http://www.cpguru.com/2008/12/01/fuzzyunreadable-text-in-adobe-captivate/

Adobe Captivate and Flash Player 10

Happy new year everyone!

I recently upgraded my Flash Player to version 10 and it wasn’t until I had to preview a project in Captivate that I discovered something was wrong.

Whenever I hit F4 or F8 the project displayed, but I couldn’t see any of the Flash animations I had added but I could see the text and static images. At first I thought it was a bug in Captivate because this particular project had a lot of added flash animations, flash interactivity and flash components with external XML file support.

If I published the project and viewed the output files then everything worked fine. It wasn’t until I started on another project and added a simple flash animation that I figured out what was wrong. That project wouldn’t preview correctly either so I started trying various things to fix the issue. By chance I used another computer and loaded up the same project. It previewed just fine there and that computer had Flash Player 9 installed.

Therefore if you have upgraded your Flash Player to version 10 then you will not be able to preview projects with interactive content. The published projects work just fine, but it’s a pain in the neck that you have to re-publish the project everytime you made a small change just to see the result.

I found this post on the Adobe Forums, which explains what the problem is:

Hi,
What you’ve noticed is an issue we are tracking in Captivate 3. If your projects contain an FMR or an inserted FLV or animations- these might not show up in your preview; but your final project (when published) will not be affected.Thanks,
Shameer
Adobe Captivate

The reason is that- before previewing we look for the Active-X version on your machine, and if it is between version 6 and 9, we preview for the version found. If an Active-X between 6 and 9 is not found, we default to the SWF-6 format. This format doesn’t support SWF’s which are greater than 7 or FLVs. This explains why the assets don’t show up at preview.
We will be putting up a tech-note on this.

 

Reducing the file size of your Captivate projects

One of the most important things when working with Adobe Captivate is to keep an eye on the file size of your finished project. It’s easy to sit and design a stunning course using high-res photos and custom graphics, but some tend to forget that the end-user of the product might not appreciate the increased loading time.

Luckily it is still possible to produce visually stunning courses and still keeping the file size down to an acceptable level.

Here in this post I’ll try to shed some light on what we do when we produce courses in Adobe Captivate as well as some other tips & tricks.

Adobe Connect Metadata

Are you using Adobe Connect to deliver your courses to your end-users? If not then you can disable the metadata for Adobe Connect. This is set to on by default and increases the file size of your project and published files.

As an example – The demonstration here -http://www.cpguru.com/demonstrations/captivatePreloader/howToChangeGraphics_demo.htm - about how to modify the graphics in the preloader have the following sizes.

With Adobe Connect Metadata:
Captivate project file = 1.81 mb.
The published swf file = 404 kb.

Without Adobe Connect Metadata:
Captivate project file = 1.63 mb.
The published swf file = 277 kb.

This is just a basic 12 slide presentation, but the published file size has increased rather dramatically.

Therefore if you don’t need Adobe Connect Metadata then you might as well disable it.

You disable it in Project Settings – Output options – and then uncheck the “Publish Adobe Connect Pro metadata” checkbox.

Slide quality

Another thing to consider is the “slide quality”. If you right-click on a slide and open “Slide Properties”  you can choose between different set qualities for the specific slide. The following options are available:

Standard
Optimized
Jpeg

High Quality

The standard quality is basically unusable – images will have artifacts and your text will look like crap. I don’t think I can remember a single project where we have used the standard quality.

But what is the difference between Optimized, Jpeg and High Quality?

I took a reference image from Kodak (http://r0k.us/graphics/kodak/kodim04.html)  (lossless PNG image). I added a grayscale gradient as well as some different color variations. I saved it from Photoshop as a Jpeg image (quality 12) and it turned out to be 298kb big. I also saved the same image as a non-interlaced PNG image from Photoshop and it ended up at 489kb.

Click on the links below to see the images used for the test

The JPG test image

The PNG test image

I then imported these images into Captivate and made 4 different slide with each image and used the 4 different publish qualities in Captivate.

Size wise this is what you get:

Notice how big the difference is between High Quality and the other settings. Also JPG and PNG images are basically the same size unless in High Quality where PNG is almost 25% smaller.

Now the interesting part is that the standard quality pumps out swf files at 185kb at an appalling quality and the Jpeg setting is only 106kb. The quality difference between these two settings is like night and day. The standard quality is basically worthless but Jpeg is definitely something you can use.

One thing is file size but how do the result actually look?

Click here to see the results.  Please notice that this page holds all 8 images so it might take a while to load.

When I look at the resulting images I reach the following conclusion. The standard quality is not worth using at all, which is weird since the output swf’s are rather large.

Between the Jpeg and Optimized quality there is a slight difference if you look at the greyskale bar. The optimized quality has a slight advantage over the Jpeg quality here. I would still chose the Jpeg setting since the output swf’s are 60% smaller than those with the Optimized quality setting.

Between Jpeg/optimized and High Quality I can see a difference, but it’s so small that it’s barely noticeable. If you look closely at the images you can see that the woman’s hair and her eyes are slightly more detailed in the images which used the HQ setting. However the difference is so small that in no way does it justify the file size increase of 8 times for JPG images and 6 times for PNG (when compared to the Jpeg setting). 

Also keep in mind that while we developers most likely have some good big-size quality monitors, most end-users don’t.

In my company we always use the Jpeg quality setting in Captivate when developing courses. It’s more than adequate for our needs and it doesn’t compromise quality for size.

Preloader

Another thing to keep in mind when developing courses is to add a preloader if it’s a big project. There’s nothing worse than just staring at a blank screen wondering what is happening.

Captivate comes with a number of different preloaders so use one of those. Alternatively you can make your own preloader if you have Flash knowledge.

Custom Preloader for Adobe Captivate

Are you tired of using the same old preloaders in your Captivate projects? Well here is a change. A fully customizable preloader with 9 different color schemes.

You can add your company logo and custom text so that it’s related to your particular project.

The component is made in Adobe Flash so you need at least Flash 8.0 to edit it. If you don’t have Flash installed on your PC click here to download a trial version (30 days free trial).

Click here to see the different color schemes included in the download. The Photoshop PSD file is also included in the download so you can easily change the images/colors yourself.

Click here to see a Captivate presentation on how to change the graphics in Adobe Flash.

Click here to buy and download the Custom preloader.

Adobe Captivate Tutorials

I found these Adobe Captivate Tutorials from Adobe and thought that I would share it here on the blog.

They are pretty basic but gives a good insight into what Adobe Captivate can do.

Recording and publishing software simulations
Editing Adobe Captivate projects
Creating interactive training scenarios
Creating quizzes with Adobe Captivate
Adding audio to Adobe Captivate projects
Adding Flash video to your Captivate project
Adding Captivate SWFs to your Adobe Presenter project