The Creative Trainer: November 2012

Thursday, November 15, 2012

Change the Background, Keep the Objects

Adobe Captivate 5.5: Change the Background, Keep the Objects

by Kevin Siegel

A fellow Captivate developer sent me an email asking for advice. It seemed that he had just completed a slick eLearning lesson in Captivate. But as soon as he published the lesson, an email arrived from his application developer informing him that the application had just been updated. There were "minor" changes to the interface that needed to be included in the eLearning lesson.

I was asked if there was anything that the developer could do to show those "minor" updates short of re-recording and re-producing the lesson. (He had spent 40 hours producing the lesson and didn't have another 40 hours to spare.)

I asked him if the interface changes were, in fact, minor.

"Yes."

I asked him if he had included a significant number of buttons, text captions and other objects in the original project.

"Yes."

"Yes."

and "Oh yes!"

One final question from me: Was it possible to record the new lesson using the same width and height of the original?

"Yes."

After his final yes, I had a "yes" of my own. If you ever find yourself in a similar situation, you will love the instructions you find at this link:

http://iconlogic.blogs.com/weblog/2011/07/adobe-captivate-55-change-the-background-keep-the-objects.html

Adobe Captivate 5.x: Web Page Widget

Bring the web into your presentations. This widget allows you to insert a web page into your Adobe Captivate 5.x web projects.

What can it do?

It can insert a web page using a:

Web address such as http://CaptivateDev.com
Relative Path such as “myfolder/myHTMLFile.htm”
HTML string such as “<html><head></head><body>Hello Wolrd Wide Web!</body></html>”
Captivate User Variable such as $$UserVariable$$ that would contain the html syntax in a string like the above.
It can also interpret variables so you could have a string or a URL such as http://mywebsite.com?user=$$myUserVariable$$
You can have two-way communication between the web page and Captivate 5 if you know JavaScript.

Use Cases:

Inserting PDF files (embedded into your web page).
Displaying Legacy AS2 .swf files (such as Articulate Presenter files or Captivate 3 or 4 files) in your AS3 Captivate 5 projects.
Showing corporate policies that must be kept to date. No need to republish your Captivate 5 project every time a policy changes if you’re displaying a web page that already has the current info from your corporate intranet.
Display a Google Form, Spreadsheet, or Doc that shows up-to-date information.
Create your own web mashups with Facebook, or Twitter and place them inside of your presentation.
Have users take a training evaluation survey from http://www.surveymonkey.com/ or http://polldaddy.comall within Captivate.
Whatever you can stuff into a web page, you can now show inside of Captivate.

http://captivatedev.com/2010/11/05/adobe-captivate-5-web-page-widget/