October 17, 2011

Captivate external links that don't work on imported Powerpoint slides

The other day a Captivate author showed me a new problem: on one slide, resource links she had put into a slide imported from Powerpoint were not working.


At first I thought it might be a security issue or a problem with absolute vs. relative links, but it turned out to be caused by overlapping clickboxes. She had started the project by importing a Powerpoint file, selecting "Advance slide on click" rather than "Automatic advance" when importing. This setting creates large clickboxes that cover the entire slide, and the slide-encompassing clickbox was overlapping our link clickboxes.

We removed the slide-covering clickbox and added a Next button, which made more sense anyway, and the links now work.

One other thing to check, particularly if you are new to Captivate. When a clickbox is inserted, it has a duration. Check the Timeline to see that its duration lasts the whole slide duration, or at least until you will want to click it.

Posted by ellen at 8:45 PM

October 12, 2011

Flash Firebug: No SWF files with AS3 detected on this page. You could try reloading the page.

Flash Firebug is a great tool for debugging Actionscript 3 SWF files, similar to the way regular Firebug helps debug Javascript and CSS when using Firefox.

But the current version of Flash Firebug, 3.0.3, has a bug that causes it to display this error:

No SWF files with AS3 detected on this page. You could try reloading the page.


This can happen even when there definitely IS an Actionscript 3 swf on the current page. To resolve the problem, install any later version than 3.0.2, available from this site:

FlashFirebug Version History


Posted by ellen at 1:39 PM