Month: July 2009

1. Deleted both captivate_v30 and captivate_v40 dat files.

2. Created a one slide blank project in both Captivate 3 & 4, inserted a click box and button with success, failure and hint captions on each. These worked.

3. Copied the interactions from the blank slide to my project, issue returned. Success and hint captions displayed, failure captions did not.

4. Uninstalled Flash Player 10 and installed Flash Player 9.0.151.0. No impact on the issue.

5. Uninstalled and re-installed both Captivate 3 and 4 with no impact on the issue.

The problem is probably more simplistic. Check your slides and see if there are multiple, competing objects on a slide.

Response:

I did find that the competing objects were the issue. I had an Exit and Back button set to display for the entire slide duration that was interfering with the objects I intended the student to use in the simulation. Once I adjusted their timing to appear after the last interaction object on each slide everything started to work. 

1. The most effective is to reduce the file size to less than
   100kb. For most Captivate projects this still offers a good quality resolution in PNG format.

2. Using Photoshop, lock the transparency then save the file again. If the save was previously interlaced then choose the opposite (none) this time–reverse if interlaced previously. Then reimport the file. This is not always effective but for some quirky reason, sometimes it works. It will not work with very large files but seems to work with stubborn smaller PNG files, where Captivate is interpreting transparency as black."

Creating Flash Animations for Adobe Captivate

RJ Jacquez, Senior Product Evangelist at Adobe has created a very useful presentation demonstrating how to create animation in Adobe Flash specifically with Adobe Captivate in mind. Click here to watch the video.

David and Kevin…

HUGE kudos on the simple OCR article in the last Skills and Drills newsletter. I was LITERALLY looking at the OmniPage software when I opened the newsletter and found out that Acrobat does everything OmniPage does! I am re-formatting a book I published about 10 years ago and need to update and upgrade it. I only have a scan of a hardcopy (no softcopy). You just saved me dozens of hours of re-typing (or about $100 if I'd gone with OmniPage).

by Jon Lloyd

Have you considered doing less with… well, less?

Seems like the phrase of the moment is "do more with less." Even the latest marketing email from Harvard Business has all the answers for you–a collection of articles for a measly $89, what a deal!

In today's challenging business climate, managers are under pressure to produce better results with the same or fewer resources than before. Maximum productivity is now absolutely critical at both the personal and organizational levels.

I agree that many organizations are looking to do more with less. There are less people and there is more work right? Um, maybe.

Is there more work? Probably. Given the nature of mergers and acquisitions, systems implementations such as LMSs and web conferencing systems to save money and train more people virtually, and a lot of companies that frankly still have their processes stuck in first gear, or maybe just stuck because that's the way it's always been done, well, there is certainly a lot to tackle.

Are there less people? Yes. No offense. If you haven't been touched personally in your family, or close friends, you know someone who knows someone that has been affected by the current economic crisis. No doubt. I can heartily empathize with you here.

I even noticed a recent article about "singletasking." Do you ever remember doing that? Hmmm, it's been awhile. However, I would not hesitate to see this as a new 'trend' that suddenly hits the cover of Newsweek.

The concept of doing "less with less" has to do with the fact that many organizations are stuck with old school processes and reasons for doing 'it'. Wayne (Hodgins) uses the term 'perfecting the irrelevant'. Here are some suggestions for doing less with less:

1. Examine how your outputs and deliverables map to the company's goals and business needs. Decide what has to be done, and what is legacy – you're doing it because that's the way it's been done for.
2. Determine how your processes for taking the remaining items to market can be optimized for scale. If you aren't looking at this now, you should. Whatever the business goals your company has, obviously growth is going to be one of them, and you need to build scalable processes and methodologies to scale to support it.
3. Innovate. Take your team offsite. (Hey, McDonald's has free wifi. Your public library probably has a quiet workroom, also with wifi, that you might be able to use.) Determine what deliverables that you HAVE to produce can be done in a completely different way. There are plenty of sites and books about brainstorming, and using mindmapping tools are a great help.

Each question slide in your project can be assigned a time limit. However, if the project itself doesn't contain question slides, your LMS would have to control the time limits.

Writing Training Documents and eLearning Scripts

Congratulations! You've been selected to write the user manual for your company's next big software release. And following that, you've been invited to write the script for the company's Employee Benefits portal and eLearning lessons.

What's that you say? It's been a while since you had to write at such a granular level? Maybe you think your writing could be better? Or perhaps, like many tasked with writing training materials and scripts or user documentation, writing qualifies as "other duties as assigned."

This live, interactive writing course is designed for you. Think of it as an intensive retreat that will give the jump-start you need to create clear, concise step-by-step documentation that effectively educates and motivates adult learners.

To learn more about this class, click here.