Category: Captivate

GooberGuide to Adobe Captivate

Posted on July 25, 2008 by ellen

I got a chance to take a look at a new Captivate eBook the other day, “GooberGuides – Captivate Tips & Tricks,” and I really wish I’d had this months ago. Captivate Tips and Tricks is a compendium of all the time-saving answers the other books never tell you. For example the tip on how to use wildcard text in text entry boxes would have been well worth the modest price of the ebook when I ran into that problem on a recent project.

The chapter on preventing project corruption is brief but extremely useful. If you’ve worked with Captivate for a while, you’ve probably corrupted a project. The tips in this chapter should be on the opening splash screen when you first launch Captivate.

Window names cannot contain spaces in “window.open” scripts for IE

Posted on May 11, 2008 by ellen

A customer’s course was crashing Internet Explorer when a popup window script executed. It turns out that the name of the new window contained a space. This didn’t bother Safari or Firefox, but Internet Explorer

Maximizing the Captivate window automatically

Posted on May 9, 2008 by ellen

We found that some of our users did not know how to maximize windows (or even that it was possible!), and so never saw the navigation bar and buttons on the bottom of a Captivate-based course they had to take.

The customer who designed the course asked that we add instructions on maximizing the window, but I thought that it would make more sense just to make the window maximize itself.

It’s been a while since I used window sizing functions, so I went hunting for a script that works across all browsers.

After trying several, I found that some “auto-maximize window” scripts don’t even work every time on ANY browser. The one that worked best on every browser I tested it on is available free from Dynamic Drive, here.

Captivate 3 Quizzes marking “failed” when quiz is not completed

Posted on April 11, 2008 by ellen

We use Captivate 3 quizzes sometimes with our Docent 6.5 LMS. Usually the quizzes have multiple parts or “SCOs” but occasionally we build one that has only one part.

Sometimes people launch a quiz but need to quit before they are done taking it, and in such cases we would prefer it be marked “incomplete” and allow them another chance to take the quiz. Usually we would also prefer any failed quiz to be allowed to be retaken.

But, by default, Captivate sees any failure to reach the mastery score as completions.

There is an easy fix,
suggested by Franck Buland on the Adobe Captivate forums

– simply modify the [project].htm file at lines 95, 96, 97.

How to analyze Captivate Movie structure

Posted on January 30, 2008 by ellen

If you want to create widgets that control Captivate files with new functions, other than the standard playbar functions, you will need to develop them in flash. Here’s how to figure out what is going on in a Captivate movie file:

Create a Captivate movie, and publish it (Captivate 2) or export it to Flash (Captivate 3). To create my faster-slower widgets, I had to decompile it into an .fla (I used SWFdecompiler )

Open it in Flash, and start exploring the structure. If you are using version 3, by far the best tool you can use include the “debug movie” command.

Speed control widgets for Captivate

Posted on July 30, 2007 by ellen

These 2 widgets allow your users to alter the speed (in frames per second) of the Captivate presentation they are viewing. To use them, go to the first slide you want the widget to appear

Randomizing Captivate Quizzes

Posted on April 27, 2007 by ellen

Captivate quizzes are easy to create, but they lack some often-requested features. Even using version 2, it is difficult, if not impossible, to randomize questions within Captivate. The following method will alter the html wrapper generated when you publish a Captivate project so that it chooses from a bank of alternate Captivate SWF files when the page opens.

Download example HTML wrapper file

When you publish to Flash (SWF) in Captivate, Captivate creates an HTML wrapper which contains the SWF file in an object tag. (Usually titled “ProjectTitle.htm”) There is a variable, “strURLFile ,” which determines which Captivate file is launched. In the unaltered file, this variable is set to the project title you set when you published.

Rescuing a corrupt Captivate File

Posted on February 2, 2007 by ellen

If you do any work with Adobe Captivate, you probably have experience with Captivate’s tendency to corrupt files. The last Captivate project I worked on gave me a chance to get reaquainted with this feature, so I am posting the solution which saved my work:

First, you must know the exact size of the old project. If you are using an odd size, be sure to note it down. Create a new, blank project at that size. Select “File>Import Slides/Objects” and import all the slides and their objects from the corrupted project. If you don’t see any slides to import, you are probably out of luck.

The knowledgebase article on adobe.com does not seem to be available anymore, but the cached version is still available on Google:

Google cache of the article

Captivate and SumTotal 6.5: Part 1. Setup

Posted on July 20, 2006 by ellen

Part 1. Setup | Jump to Part 2: Enable SCORM output>>

I’m involved in producing some Captivate-based assessments for use with SumTotal 6.5. There are many settings and variables that must be set correctly to get everything working to our specifications, so it took some serious testing to figure out the best settings.

Hopefully this will shorten the time for anyone with similar needs.

The requirements: We are producing competency-based learning modules and assessments. Users must complete the multi-SCO assessment with a score of 100%. They aren’t that easy, so it is expected that they will need several if not many tries to complete one SCO. Each interaction within any given SCO will allow three tries before the slide moves on.
Each SCO will allow an infinite number of tries.