Thursday, April 17, 2008

Last Session of the Conference - Great Tips for Creating software Simulations Using Adobe Captivate

presented by Joe Ganci, of Dazzle Technologies Corp.

New things that are different from yesterday's Master Class -

When recording, you can hit the pause button to pause the recording action, so you can move things around or adjust things in the middle.

During his example, the screen blacked out on his laptop - JG says this is when it goes into FRM mode which changes the acceleration of the video card automatically so that the capture can be played back appropriately. The black will not show during playback. This does not happen on my system, but I'm using a ATI Radeon X1200 video card.

If you have to deliver in more than two languages, there is a productive way to accomplish this by creating the file, then save the file several times with different names. Export the captions in the first file you want to change, change the text, save the export and change the Updated Caption Text Data to the different language, then reimport the captions.

If you do create new rdl files for alternate languages, I haven't tried this but I wonder if you downloaded additional clx files into the Spelling/Languages directory in captivate, would it work to spell check any additional text you have added to the project out side the captions? Dictionary files are available all over the web.

Note: Closed captioning defaults are changed only in the skin area, not in the overall preferences.

During the break - woot, I won a T-shirt!

I really need to take the time to rip apart the behind the scenes stuff that is going on with this program. It seems that there are many things that can be tweaked that most people haven't even tried yet.

Since all events made by software when you are building simulation are the only thing capture when recording with Captivate (very annoying),- I've done this in the past, but if I do not hear the shutter (happens alot when simulating with firefox) you can press the PrtScr button on the keyboard. Note: you may have to adjust the timing on these slides a little.

It is possible to track teh user's progress on any type of interactions built into Captivate (test entry, click box, or button) - this is on the Reporting tab. Normally the include in Quiz otpin is turned off - by turning it on, you allow captivate to include this interaction in the final process bar.

Ok, time to go home - I will try to post my summary thoughts tomorrow, as it seems that it might take longer to get home due to delays at the airports. :(

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