A user on the Adobe Captivate forums asked the following question:
When you don’t have any buttons on the screen, the movie advances from one slide to the other till the end.
However, I usually want the movie to pause at the end of each slide. Instead of placing (and configuring) a pause button on each slide, is there a feature available to globally configure such a pause action, e.g. a Widget that is displayed for rest of project?
I thought it was a good idea so I made a small widget that does exactly that. This widget pauses each slides 45 frames before it ends. The 45 frames is equivalent to 1.5 second before the slide timeline ends when you use the default 30 fps publishing settings in Adobe Captivate.
If you use the Adobe Captivate playbars then you can just insert this widget on your first page and set it to “display for rest of project” and all your slides will automatically be paused and await user interaction with the navigation buttons in the playbar.
Download the widget below – the widget uses AS2 and Flash Player 9.
[download#3#image]
22 Comments
if we can somehow configure the “pause before ’45’ frames” i.e, 1.5 sec than it would be great. Some slides might have few contents that may be in 1.5 sec duration and it might need pause at say 0.5 sec before end.
True and my original idea was to make it possible to define the pause in the widget parameters. For some reason it didn’t work as planned though. I will take a closer look at it sometime next week and see if I can make it possible to adjust the pause time.
This is not really necessary. If you add any click box (not a button)and select ‘pause project until user clicks’ captivate will play as many frames as have been alloted then stop and wait for an advance click.
(the user can just use the advance on the play bar, I usually just hide the clear click box in discrete corner of my presentation.)
True, but if you have a project with 100 individual slides then you need to insert 100 click boxes. With this widget you just insert it once and then no more.
/Michael
No need to worry about that.
Captivate has the ability to paste into multiple slides. Place you new click box in any one slide, ctl c, select all your slides in the film strip area (ctl a) and paste the box in all slide simultaneously. (you can also use the apply to all settings in the properties box.
I have recently done this in a e-learning module with 200+ slides, works like a charm.
This feature is also great for making sure all your text boxes are aligned throughout a module/presentation as you can just mass paste a text box in all your slides and then add conten afterward.
Cheers
Chris
Hi Chris,
I didn’t know that it was possible to paste objects into multiple slides at once, but that is a great feature. Your idea of aligning the text boxes like that is great. I’ll be using that in future projects. Thanks for the tip.
As for the pause widget – I guess that it’s up to what you feel works better for you. I like to just import it once and then I don’t have to worry about it anymore. If I imported click boxes on all the slides and then needed to change something with the pause I would have to edit all the slides.
The apply to all function is buggy as hell. I used it a couple of times and in 50% of the cases it screwed up something else. Last week I did a change to a project where I wanted to remove the fade out transitions on all the text boxes. I applied only the changed properties, but Captivate ended up changing all my text boxes to centered text as well. Since I had done several changes before (and of course not saved before doing the apply to all) I ended up spending a lot of time reformatting the text boxes again.
/Michael
I have mouse animation on my slides, which are all stills (no motion). When I use this widget, each time I click the Play button, the mouse moves around the screen, but slide 1 remains displayed. And the slide counter shows that I’m advancing the slides.
No, sorry, I spoke too soon. I’d accidentally set all my first slide properties to all the rest of the slides, and that included all the backgrounds. Fortunately, it was just a test file. The widget works great in CP 4 on Vista. Thanks!
Just a quick question, is it possible to create a version of the widget that uses an earlier version of Flash, I have been using it on a project and works great on the laptop I am creating it on, but when I uploaded it to the network I have found that the networked PC are on Flash 7.
Any ideas, at the minute I am looking at putting a click box on every page, but due to the varying screen lengths, do I need to put them at the end of the timeline for each screen, or do I just enter one for duration of slide?
Am pulling hair out as deadline is tomorrow 10 am.
Thanks for any help
Honestly I’m not sure it would work for Flash 7 since it uses the Widget API so it contains some pretty advanced code.
You could insert a click box but it needs to be done on every single page. However, you can insert it on one page and then right-click to copy and then paste it on all your other slides directly from the storyboard view. You would still need to adjust the pause on each slide manually though.
/Michael
Micheal,
Thanks for the speedy response, and the advice.
I am inputing the click boxes as I type, only 180 left, oh what fun.
Tiggaa
Hey, I’m trying to do the same thing, but the pause widget isn’t working even when I use the newer version of Flash to publish. Any ideas why that might be?
Hi Larue,
You mean that this widget doesn’t work for you?
/Michael
The question I have is why would anybody just have a runaway function such as play without the ability to shut the thing off internally. I am trying to do a complex interface with multiple buttons and every time I click anywhere the player takes off. Very fustrating to work with. Should also support property values for things like rectangle fill color or text displays that don’t select when you click them so you could use conditions statements to change status of an object. This tool could be very powerful just need to mature. Can’t wait to see if Adobe picks up on such minor yet powerful functions.
What if you have 4 buttons on a slide. The buttons navigate just fine BUT if the user clicks on teh slide or waits to long, the slide continues on. I have the slide properties sent to no action on slide exit. I have the button set to if user clicks outside of button no action….now what?
Hi,
First I would like to thank for giving this pause widget. I have used in my e-learning project. Its working fine.
My Doubt is this: In one slide I have 5 click boxes(I have checked the option “pause project until user clicks”). Each click box will reveal a text caption by clicking it. (I have this pause widget in very first slide and i have set this available for all slide by setting rest of the project option). In output , in that particular slide, when user clicks any one of the click box slide is getting advanced i mean its going to next slide. Can you help me out to get rid of this issue?
Thanks in advance
Manoharan.A
@Manoharan – This is unfortunately a behaviour that the Adobe engineers have implemented. A click box or interactive object will automatically resume play back after it has been clicked. One work around is to insert 5 more click boxes that will pause your project again after each of your interactive click boxes, but this is not fool proof. Another option is to create the interaction in Flash instead and then have Flash send a “resume” command to Captivate once the objective has been reached. This is how I normally do it.
/Michael
Thanks Michael for your quick response and alternative solution.
Hey Michael,
So… now that CP5 is out, any chance you’ll be upgrading this handy little widget for AS3?
Not even close to subtle,
-Dusty. 😉
@ Dusty – Sorry I missed your comment ealier.. I wont be updating this particular widget, but James Wheat has released an AS3 version of a similar widget so go grab that one instead – http://wheatblog.com/2010/06/pausemenow-as3-widget-for-adobe-captivate-version-1/
/Michael
Good deal. Thanks for the link, Michael. 🙂
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