Month: September 2009

by Kevin A. Siegel

It's the beginning of a new week. Look at you… all rested from a glorious weekend. Now it's time to start Captivate, open that pesky project and continue along your merry way to eLearning glory.

Before moving forward with your Captivate development today, I suggest you back up… or should I say "backup."

As simple as the concept of backing up your work might be, I am constantly surprised when I hear from even veteran Captivate developers that a project has become corrupt (the project, which was fine yesterday, won't open today). The fix? If the project won't open, there's a good chance that the only thing anyone can do is copy a backup project to the local disk and then open the backup. Oh, you don't have a backup? Ouch!

Save yourself a lot of aggravation by copying your project files from your local disk to a backup drive on your network (even a Flash drive is okay). On my computer, I have a folder called Captivate Projects. I drag the entire folder to my off-site network drive before I leave my computer for any length of time. Why offsite? What happens if, God forbid, your office is broken into and your fancy laptop ends up in the wrong hands? What happens if there's a fire? A flood? If your backup was on the same computer that was just stolen, or your network drive is in the same location as the fire, you're asking for trouble.

What's that you say, you can't remember to backup your stuff. I feel your pain… it's not fun to backup your stuff and it takes time. In addition to manually backing up my project folder each day, I purchased a program that automatically backs up my stuff to an off-site drive once a week. The program I use is called PC Backup Pro. At $50 it's inexpensive and well worth a look (if you are looking for a side-by-side review and comparisons of the top 10 backup programs, this site might prove interesting–PC Backup Pro made that list).

BAK, BAK, BAK!

Another way to protect yourself from corrupt files is to allow Captivate to creates a backup file of your project when you save it.

Choose Edit > Preferences. In the Preferences dialog box, select General Settings from the Global menu. Select Generate Project Backup. (Note: The option is enabled by default.)

From now on, when you re-save your Captivate project the changes will be saved to a backup file with a .bak extension.

If your Captivate project file becomes corrupt, and you forgot to backup the project to a network drive, you can use the backup file to recover your project. All you will need to do is rename the backup file using a .cp extension and then open it with Captivate.

In a short how-to video, RJ Jacquez, Senior Product Evangelist at Adobe, demonstrates how Captivate and Photoshop can be used together. RJ uses one of Photoshop's default actions to quickly add a Text Panel to a Captivate project. Click here to watch the video.

by Kevin A. Siegel

I received an email from a Captivate developer last week wanting to know if it was possible to create click boxes into any other shapes than the boring old squares or rectangles. Interesting question, and the answer is: "Nope." When it comes to click boxes, the shape of the box has always been rectangle or square.

Bummed out? Don't be. In Captivate, things aren't always black and white. While click boxes cannot be made into complex shapes, you can accomplish much of what you can do with a click box by using a Rollover Slidelet instead–and Rollover Slidelets can be redrawn on the fly into complex shapes.

Insert and Reshape a Rollover Slidelet

To insert a Rollover Slidelet, choose Insert > Standard Objects > Rollover Slidelet.

Upon inserting the Rollover Slidelet, you will have two objects on your slide: the Rollover Slidelet and a Slidelet.

To make the Rollover Slidelet behave like a click box, right-click the Rollover Slidelet and choose Properties. On the Rollover Slidelet tab, select Navigate from the "If the user clicks inside the Rollover Slidelet" area. Then you can click the desired navigation from the On Click drop-down menu.

If your goal is to make the Rollover Slidelet behave like a click box, you'll probably want to ensure the Slidelet doesn't appear on the slide when the customer clicks the Rollover Slidelet.

Right-click the Slidelet and choose Properties.

On the Options tab, deselect Visible (remove the check mark from the box) and then click OK.

And that's that… ummmm, except for the complex shape part that was what you were trying to create all along. To take care of that final chore, simply right-click the Rollover Slidelet and choose Edit Points.

Drag the points around to suite your needs–or your shape. When you click outside the shape, the Rollover Slidelet will take on the its new form.