Category: Captivate

by Kevin Siegel

You are recording a demonstration and you'd like to capture the amount of time a process takes. For instance, clicking a button in your application takes 7 seconds for the process to complete. However, when you record the demonstration, Captivate captures the button click and the resulting screen, but does not capture the 7 seconds it took for the process to conclude. In fact, Captivate's Timeline seems to have ignored the processing time altogether.

It's a real timing dilemma! As far as I'm concerned, it's a bad idea to capture the 7 second delay between one click and the next. Just because a process takes time, doesn't mean that you have to force your learner to experience the delays.

I recently worked with a client who wanted to show the actual delays a user would experience between one click and the next to make the demonstration more realistic.

Believe it or not, Captivate does have a little known or used feature that will allow you to record your clicks and the resulting delays that might occur between one screen and the next.

Show Captivate's Preferences (Edit menu if you're using Windows; Adobe Captivate menu if you're using a Macintosh).

From the Recording group, select Settings and, from the Audio Options, select Actions in Real Time.

From now on, recording a 12-minute process will force your eLearning video to play for 12-minutes. A 20-second delay between clicks will result in a 20-second play time for the Captivate slide.

Fair warning however… most eLearning videos won't be better by recording Actions in Real Time. In fact, the published videos will be larger and will play longer than necessary. Be sure to go back to the Preferences dialog box and disable the Actions in Real Time option prior to recording if you don't want to use it.

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by Kevin Siegel

Over the past few months I've been creating more and more Project Templates for my customers. Some of the most important things you can add to a Project Template are placeholders. What are placeholders? As the name implies, placeholders hold a spot on a slide or within a project for specific objects. For instance, if you always want a Text Animation of the first slide of a project, you can insert a Text Animation Placeholder, set the animation, and other Properties.

There are several placeholders you can add to a Project Template including Text Captions, Images, Animation and even Recording Slides.

When a Captivate developer creates a new project based on a Project Template, the placeholders will be available for use. And since placeholders retain their predefined Properties, all that a  developer needs to do is double-click the placeholder and add the content. The developer does not need to spend time worrying such things as Caption Type, Character Family or Size.

While placeholders are great timesavers, there are a few problem. First, when placeholder objects are inserted onto templates slides, they won't be visible when you preview or publish the template. In addition, placeholders have an annoying feature… they aren't WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) when they're created. In fact, the formatting you apply to a placeholder only shows itself once the template is being used by a new project.

Let's take a look at the text caption placeholder in the image below. I formatted the caption so that it used the HaloBlue Caption type and the font formatting was set to Verdana, Regular, 16. However, even though the Properties panel verifies my formatting, the placeholder is less than cooperative. In fact, if I didn't know any better, I would assume that the Properties didn't take and I'd try to format the placeholder over and over and over and over again.

The formatting won't be WYSIWYG until the template is called into service. If one of your developers were to double-click the placeholders, it would show its true formatting.

Since I'm a visual person, I really need to see how something is going to look before I'm comfortable. In short, I really need my WYSIWYG.

If you're like me, you'll love this little trick. While working in a Project Template (you cannot insert placeholders into a regular Captivate project), insert a standard text caption (not a text caption placeholder).

Format the caption as you normally would. In the image below, you can see that I've formatted the caption using the HaloBlue Caption type and the font formatting was set to Verdana, Regular 16.

While the appearance of the caption is indeed WYSIWYG, there is a problem. The caption isn't a placeholder so it won't behave like a placeholder once the template is placed into service.

So here's the trick… delete the text caption. And BAM! Instead of the caption actually being deleted, the caption converts to a placeholder.

The formatting of the placeholder is no longer WYSIWYG but my goal was achieved–I visually confirmed the desired format and left the developer with a placeholder. However, when developers use the template and double-click the placeholder, the formatting will already be set. Cool!

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by Kevin Siegel

You've produced your Captivate project in record time. The only thing left to do is Publish the project. Anyone who has published a Captivate project knows it is a simple process of choosing File > Publish and setting the appropriate options. Of course, at some point you do actually need to click the Publish button. And what happens then? Well, to be honest, after clicking the Publish button, even a quick developer hits the wall. Why? It takes time for Captivate project to publish. How much time? Depending on the amount of memory you have on your system, it could take several minutes.

Adobe ran some time trials on how long it took to publish a large project (254 slides) using Captivate 4. On their test systems, it took just over 1:45 to publish the project. That may not seem like a long time, but that's nearly two minutes of twiddling your thumbs while the project is published. During that time, you cannot do anything in the project. Make a change (even a minor change) and need to republish? Publishing the updated project will take another full 1:45, even if the change you made to the project was minor.

When Adobe created Captivate 5, they wanted to decrease your twiddle time. To that end, Adobe came up with a feature called the incremental publish engine.

So let's take a look at the publish time in Captivate 5 as compared to Captivate 4. As mentioned above, a large Captivate 4 project (254 slides) took just over 1:45 to publish. The same project was published using Captivate 5. The results? Captivate 5 published the project in 2:05. Yeee hahhh! Ummm… wait a minute. Thanks to the wonderful incremental publish engine, Captivate 5 is now even slower? I don't know about you but anything that makes me work slower isn't a good thing.

While it appears that the incremental publish engine is a problem, it's actually a wonderful enhancement. While it might take a bit longer to perform an initial publish, republishing the project after you've made changes is going to return some fantastic results.

Remember that it took the same amount of time to republish a project in Captivate 4, even if the changes were minor (1:45). How did Captivate 5 do? Adobe made the minor changes to the version 5 project and republished. Hold on to your hats… it took a mere 6 seconds to publish the changes (a time savings of more than 95%). Bam! Imagine how much time you are going to save publishing with Captivate 5. How was this minor miracle performed? Thanks to Captivate's new incremental publish engine, only the slides that actually had changes were republished.

Dare I say that your time savings will quickly pay for the upgrade fee from Captivate 4 to 5? Food for thought!

Note: If you do need to republish all of the slides in your Captivate 5 project, not just the slides that have changed, simply select Force re-publish all the slides in the Advanced Options area of the Publish dialog box.

To learn more about the incremental publish engine or review the time trials mentioned above, visit the Adobe Captivate blog.

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