Locking content in Adobe Captivate 4

In some courses / projects it might be a good idea to lock some content so the user can’t access it before completing some required slides in your project. This is especially relevant when using the TOC as the user can navigate to any slide in the project as they please.

Normally this is handled by an LMS, but you could also do it by using Advanced Actions in Captivate 4.

This is how you would do it:

On each of the required content slides you would assign a variable with a value. Then on your locked content you create an advanced action that checks for the values of these variables. If the values are okay then you display the content. If not, then you put a highlight box over the content and display a text box stating that they need to complete some required content before accessing this page.

Click here to see an example of locking content in Adobe Captivate 4

In the example project linked above I have created 5 slides and 5 variables. On slide enter these variables are assigned the value 1. On my locked content slide I perfomr a check to see if all variables are equal to 1 and then take appropriate actions.

You can download the Adobe Captivate 4 project file here: lockedContent (185)

/Michael

  • Share/Bookmark

Using advanced actions for slidelet navigation

 I recieved an email from Shaun Barrow about a little trick he had for Rollover Slidelets. I told him that if he wrote up a small tutorial I would post it here on the site.

Below is what Shaun sent me – all credits go to him. 

­I was working on a project that required me to make a rollover slidelet that when clicked would go back to the current slide.  This in itself is not possible with the current design of Captivate 4, you are unable to link to the slide the rollover slidelet is on. 

sc1

 This was an issue for me.

I then remembered I had played around with advanced actions.  The ability to create an advanced action that will Jump to a slide.  YES!  This will work because it seems Actions are independent of the actual slide itself!

  

sc2

 Now with this saved I can go back to the properties of the slidelet:

sc3

Yes, I agree it’s a hack-around but it works and saved me a lot of frustration with what I needed to do.

Hope you enjoy.

Shaun B

Shaun.barrow@gmail.com

 

 

  • Share/Bookmark

Changing the buttons in the Perpetual Button Widget for Adobe Captivate

How do I change the buttons in the Perpetual Button Widget? This is a question that has been asked a couple of times on the Adobe Captivate Forum so I thought I would make a short and simple tutorial to show you how it’s done.

If you are proficient with Adobe Flash then this is not for you, but if you are a beginner Flash user then perhaps it will be of some help.

The tutorial was created using a new screen recording tool called “Screenr”. It allows you to create small 5 minute video presentations and is super simple to use. Actually I’m amazed by the result – It’s much better than I had thought it would be.

Hope you enjoy it.

/Michael

  • Share/Bookmark

Using Advanced actions to store and show a users answers in a quiz

Sometimes you would like to present a summary slide after a quiz where you present the user with their answers to the questions and give them some extra feedback.

If you run your courses in an LMS this can be achieved (with most LMS’) by reading the data stored in the LMS database. However, if you don’t deploy through an LMS you need to take a different approach.

You can achieve this by using user defined variables and advanced actions.

Basically you need to create one variable per question. I named my userQuestion1, userQuestion2, userQuestion3 etc.

These variables will be the containers for the answer the user selects on each question in your quiz. It’s not possible to run an action (or assign a value to a variable) on a question slide in Captivate. Therefore you need to insert a blank slide after each of your questions. It just needs to be 0.2 seconds long and here we will assign our user defined variables with the relevant value.

In Captivate 4 we have a system variable called cpQuizInfoAnswerChoice. This variable contains the selected answer to the question the user just answered. Note that this variable will be overwritten when the user answers a new question.

On our 0.2 second slide we go to the slide properties – navigation area and select the “On slide exit”. Here we want to assign a value to a variable so we pick Assign from the drop down list. In the Assign field we select our user variable – userQuestion1. In the “with” field we need to select what value to assign to our variable. Here we insert the cpQuizInfoAnswerChoice variable name.

assignvariable

Basically what will happen here is that when these 0.2 seconds are done Captivate will assign the value of cpQuizInfoAnswerChoice to our user defined variable userQuestion1.

On to question 2. Again we need to make a 0.2 second slide after question 2 and then assign userQuestion2 with the value from cpQuizInfoAnswerChoice. Do this for all your questions.

Now we should have a number of variables that will be populated with the values and we need to go to the next step.

The next step is to create a slide that will show some specific information based on the values of our user defined variables.

In my example I just used some text captions, but basically you can use whatever you want.

For each question we need to create a text box for each of the answer possibilities. I just have 3 answer choices to each question so I need to create 3 text captions per question.

In the text box you can write whatever you want. As an example you could write “You selected option A: 2+2 = 4. That is correct! Good job.”. You then need to go to the options tab of the text caption and assign it with a proper name. I used question1_a, question1_b etc. Also uncheck the “Visible” tick mark.

textboxes

Now this text box is invisible until it is told otherwise by Captivate.

Once you have set up all of your text boxes it’s time to create an Advanced Action to handle the showing of the relevant text captions for each question.

Hit SHIFT + F9 to open up the Advance Actions part and create a new action. I called mine “showAnswers”.

Here we will set up a number of conditions and appropriate actions to perform when these conditions are met. For each question you need 3 conditions.

Here is the script you should use for each answer possibility on each question:

Check If ( userQuestion1 is equal to A)
begin
show question1_a
end
Or Else
being
end

actionsscreenshot

Repeat this action for all of your answer possibilities and all of your questions. (don’t you just hate the fact that you can’t copy/paste in the Advanced Actions panel!!)

Now that we have our showAnswers action set up we go to the slide properties in the navigation part and select “On slide enter:” – Execute advanced action and select our showAnswers function.

slideenter

Now when you run your quiz you should have a custom slide that shows you information based on what choices the user made.

Sample project (published and CP file) can be downloaded here: www.captivate4.com/demonstrations/quizAdvancedActions.zip

Have fun ;o)

  • Share/Bookmark

Tuturial on how to create widgets for Adobe Captivate 4

 Adobe just started up a new series of tutorials on their blog. These tutorials will explain the basics in regards to creating widgets for Adobe Captivate 4.

Here is the first post:  http://blogs.adobe.com/captivate/2009/06/captivate_widgets_tutorial_cre.html

  • Share/Bookmark

Changing the info box in the Adobe Captivate Playbar

This small tutorial shows you how to change the info box in the AS2 versions of the Adobe Captivate playbars.

Requirements:

Adobe Flash.
The image that you want to substitute the Adobe Info box with.

Instructions:

Step1:
First you need to open up the playbar fla that you want to edit. You find the source files in the directory where you installed Adobe Captivate and then Templates/PlaybackFLA/AS2.

openflashfilestep1

Step2:
Now that you have the source file open in Adobe Flash you start off by inserting a new layer in the main timeline.

insertnewlayerstep2

Step3:
Create a new movieclip (CTRL+F8) and name it “infobox”.

createnewmovieclipstep3

Step4:
Import your image to the library.

importimagestep4

Step5:
Insert the image from the library into the infobox movieclip you created.

inserimageinmovieclipstep51

Step6:
Go to the main stage and drag the infobox movieclip onto the stage (in the new layer you made).

dragmoviecliptostagestep6

Step7:
Give the infobox movieclip the instancename “infobox_mc”.

givetheinfoboxaninstancenamestep7

Step8:
With the infobox movieclip selected (click once on the clip on the stage) hit F9 to enter the actions panel. In here we need to put some code to make the movieclip invisible at the start.

Insert this code:

// this code sets the movieclip to invisible when loaded.
onClipEvent (load) { 
this._visible = false;
}
 
// this code sets the movieclip to invisible when clicked.
// We need this so the user can close the infobox again.
on (release){ 
this._visible = false;
}
insertcodeonmovieclipstep8

 

Step9:
Open the “pcbBtnInfo” from the library.

openpbcbtninfofromthelibrarystep9 

 

Step10:

Open the actions in the pcbBtnInfo movieclip (hit F9 while having the actions layer selected).

 

opentheactionsstep10

 

Step11:

Delete all the existing code.

 

Step 12:

Insert this code instead: 

var btnTipsId = 9;
function onClicked(){ 
// create a variable to hold the path
var info_mc = _parent._parent.infobox_mc;
// set the infobox as visible
info_mc._visible = true;
// align the infobox to the center of the stage
info_mc._x = (Stage.width - info_mc._width)/2; 
info_mc._y = (Stage.height - info_mc._height)/2; 
};

 

insertcodeonbuttonstep12

 

Step 13:

Save your flash file and publish it. (I used the name myPlaybar)

 

Step 14:
Go to the Templates/PlaybackFLA/AS2 directory and copy the myPlaybar.swf and paste it into C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Captivate 4\Gallery\PlaybackControls\SwfBars\AS2.

Step 15:
Select your new playbar in the Adobe Captivate settings and that’s it.

 

 

  • Share/Bookmark

How to make Thai soup ;o)

I know… It’s not exactly a headline you would expect to see on a blog about Captivate but here goes.

A couple of years ago I made a joke with my boss. He and his family had been to Thailand many times and loves the Thai soup – Tom Yam Goong. Since my wife is Thai he asked me many times when I would bring some soup for him at work. I decided to make some fun with him and made a quick and dirty tutorial in Captivate on how to make the Tom Yam Goong soup.

I just stumpled upon the files today while cleaning up my harddrive and thought why not convert it to CP4 – add some flash components / widgets and make it available here. So that’s what I did. I added my Bookmark component, a custom preloader, a progress bar and some other stuff and uploaded the course.

Keep in mind that the pictures and videos were made with my Sony digital camera 2½ years ago so the quality isn’t the best.

You watch the tutorial by cliking on the link or the image below and hopefully it will give you an understanding on how to make this delicious Thai soup ;o)

http://www.cpguru.com/demonstrations/tomYamGoong/tomYamGoong.htm

 
Screenshot of the Thai Soup tutorial

  • Share/Bookmark

Use Google Maps in your Adobe Captivate projects

Rajeev Kumar wrote a great article on his blog on how to use Google Maps in your Adobe Captivate projects. You will need Adobe Flash in order to make this work.

Take a look at Rajeevs blog here:  http://rajntechnlife.wordpress.com/2009/03/07/use-google-maps-in-your-adobe-captivate-projects/

 

Google Maps in Captivate

Google Maps in Captivate

 

  • Share/Bookmark

Adobe Captivate 4 demonstrations and tutorials

I don’t know if you guys seen these already but they are pretty worthwhile. These demonstrations are done by RJ Jacquez who is a Senior Product Evangelist at Adobe.

The entire presentation can be found here: https://admin.adobe.acrobat.com/_a295153/introducingels/

Below are the interesting topics broken up into smaller chunks.

Adobe Captivate, Photoshop and Flash:
https://admin.adobe.acrobat.com/_a295153/p85709865/

Adobe Captivate and Bridge:
https://admin.adobe.acrobat.com/_a295153/p14902785/

Adobe Captivate and Flash widgets:
https://admin.adobe.acrobat.com/_a295153/p81159410/

Adobe Captivate and Soundbooth:
https://admin.adobe.acrobat.com/_a295153/p22143509/

Adobe Captivate reviewing:
https://admin.adobe.acrobat.com/_a295153/p52752303/

Publishing to PDF, AVI, Flash and Dreamweaver:
https://admin.adobe.acrobat.com/_a295153/p65833611/

If you find some interesting demonstrations or showcases of Adobe Captivate 4 content please post a comment here so others can benefit from it.

  • Share/Bookmark

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

  • Share/Bookmark
Page 2 of 3«123»