Category: HTML5

by Kevin Siegel  

I had a client recently who requested that the playbar used in their Captivate eLearning lessons use only approved corporate colors. In fact, they wanted one of the colors on the playbar to match a color found on the corporate logo. The problem is, my contact did not know what the exact logo color was, only that it was "some kind of dark red."

Given the fact that there's a whole range of red available in the color spectrum, trying to guess which exact red was used in the logo would have been impossible. Thankfully, during the process of customizing their playbar, grabbing the exact red from their logo was really easy.

First, to change the colors on a playbar, open the Skin Editor (Project > Skin Editor). Pick any skin you like from the Skin drop-down menu. Then, from the Themes area, selectPlayback Colors.

There are four areas of the Playbar that can be modified: Background, Button Glow, Button Face and Button Icon. The client wanted the background of the Playbar to use the same color as their logo. I clicked the color square to the right of Background and selected the ever-handy Pick Color tool.

I used the Pick Color tool to point at the client's logo (which was visible on my display). One simple click on the client's "some kind of dark red" and the exact color was picked for me by the Pick Color tool.

For the record, "some kind of dark red" turned out to be "some kind of color that was closer to brown than red." Upon clicking the Background color square again, the logo color was displayed. As a bonus, I could even see the logo's hexadecimal color code for future reference (#763F2D).

I followed similar steps to grab the other colors that my client wanted. In the end, I quickly had a branded playbar that used specific colors. The final step was to simply click the Save tool at the top of the Skin Editor, and give the skin a unique name. From that point forward, the client's Skin was available in the Skin drop-down menu for use in any project.

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Looking to learn Captivate quickly? We offer two live, online Captivate 5 classes. Adobe Captivate Essentials and Adobe Captivate Beyond the Essentials (Advanced). Our Captivate 6 classes will ramp up in August.

by Kevin Siegel  

If you're a PowerPoint user, you've long appreciated the ability to draw just about any kind of shape you need on your slides using AutoShapes. In Captivate 6, you now have nearly the same ability via the Smart Shapes feature. You'll find plenty of shapes from which to choose, including Callouts, Banners and other wacky shapes. 

To insert a Smart Shape, choose Insert > Standard Objects > Smart Shape. From the Smart Shape window, you'll find that the shapes are segregated into groups. In the image below, I've selected Cloud Callout from the Basic group.

In the image below, I've drawn the callout to the left of one of my slide images. Notice, however, that the cloud is pointing in the wrong direction. 

Similar to PowerPoint's AutoShapes, all I needed to do was drag the yellow handle on the bottom of the callout left to change the direction of the callout.

And I love the fact that you can add text to a Smart Shape just like you can with a Text Caption. Since you can also assign an Object Style to Smart Shapes, I see Smart Shapes as a possible replacement for Text Captions in some of my new projects.

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Looking to learn Captivate quickly? We offer two live, online Captivate 5 classes. Adobe Captivate Essentials and Adobe Captivate Beyond the Essentials (Advanced). Our Captivate 6 classes will ramp up in August.

by Kevin Siegel  

If you are creating a soft skills eLearning lesson (a lesson teaching a life skill such as conflict resolution instead of a software simulation), the appearance of each individual slide is critical. If you are creating a software simulation, the background is typically the application being simulated so that's one less thing you have to worry about. Not so with a soft skills lesson where you either start with a blank project or import a PowerPoint presentation.

If you've started with a blank project, you need to come up with the look and feel of each slide. Ask yourself, do the slide backgrounds look professional? Do the slides adequately convey your corporate identity when it comes to the object and background colors, and the use of fonts, fonts sizes and font colors? Are the slide objects placed consistently throughout the lesson?

One way to ensure the consistent placement of repetitive objects across slides is the use of Master Slides. Since Master Slides can't create or design themselves, you'll appreciate the power of Themes.

A Theme is a collection of pre-designed and positioned slide elements, master slides, object styles and Skins designed to quickly give your project a consistent look and feel. I want to emphasise the word quickly here. Once you select a Theme, the look and feel of your project is going to dramatically change, typically for the better, and faster than you might imagine.

Captivate ships with a handful of Themes. You can use, edit and save the provided Themes. If you've got a design background, you can create your own. You can elect to apply a theme to a brand new project, or apply a Theme to any legacy project on the fly.

To apply a Theme, first display the Themes panel by choosing Themes > Show/Hide Themes Panel.

From the Themes panel, it's now a simple matter of selecting the theme that best meets your design needs.

In the image below, I've created a project with perfectly good content, but zero design.

The image below is the exact same slide as it appeared just seconds after I selected the Blackboard theme.

Keep in mind that each Theme, at its core, is simply a collection of Master Slides and Object Styles. If you don't like any one particular part of a Theme, simply edit those areas and then save the Theme (via the Themes menu). The next time you use the same Theme in any project, the updated Theme will be used instead of the original. 

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Looking to learn Captivate quickly? We offer two live, online Captivate 5 classes. Adobe Captivate Essentials and Adobe Captivate Beyond the Essentials (Advanced). Our Captivate 6 classes will ramp up in August.

by Kevin Siegel  

If you've spent time working with the Microsoft Office Suite, you  can appreciate how Microsoft provides free images that can be added to a slide with just a few clicks of the mouse. What kind of assets have historically been included with Captivate? Beyond some canned animations, not much. I've always felt that the lack of free quality images was a major shortcoming within Captivate.

With the newest release of Captivate, Adobe has addressed that shortcoming. If you visit the Insert menu in Adobe Captivate 6, you'll find a new Characters menu item.

After selecting Characters from the Insert menu, the Characters dialog box will open. There are multiple Categories, each containing multiple posed models that you are free to use in your projects. According to Adobe, the Characters will be updated from time to time, so you will likely gain access to even more Characters over time. 

Pick a Category, select a pose, click the OK button, and the selected image will appear on your slide. Anyone who has spent hours trying to find cohesive images of people for use in an eLearning project is going to be really excited about this new feature, especially since the background has already been removed from each of the Characters. The inserted Characters can be resized just like any other image. And just like that, you've got yourself an eLearning guide for your lesson.

Note: If you don't have many characters, visit the Adobe Captivate trial download page and download the eLearning Assets. Once the assets are installed, you will find that several posed characters have been added to Captivate.

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Looking to learn Captivate quickly? We offer two live, online Captivate 5 classes. Adobe Captivate Essentials and Adobe Captivate Beyond the Essentials (Advanced). Our Captivate 6 classes will ramp up in August.

by Kevin Siegel  

By this point I've created hundreds upon hundreds of eLearning projects using Captivate. In all that time, Captivate has remained very stable for me (very few crashes and zero corrupt projects). Nevertheless, I've received some emails over the last few weeks from Captivate developers who were having issues with Captivate crashing, running slowly or otherwise behaving erratically. In the vast majority of the cases, the following resolved the issues.

Editing over a network drive: Captivate projects simply cannot be edited over a network drive. Backing up your projects to a network drive is a great idea. But if you open a project and then proceed to edit it over a network drive, the project will behave erratically, work slowly and, sooner or later, become corrupt. Take my advice (and the advice of any developer who has lost a project), stay clear of your network drive. If your project is currently on a network drive, first copy the project to your local drive and then edit it.

Run as administrator. If you are using Windows Vista or 7, and you are working locally but Captivate is still behaving badly, try running the software as an Administrator. You can Captivate as an Administrator by right-clicking the Captivate application icon and choosing Run as administrator.

Virus Scanners: Many virus scanners scan your hard drive 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. The scanners are well-meaning but can rob your computer of performance and block all kinds of processes… even Captivate processes. I'd suggest stopping your virus scanner while you're working within Captivate. Instead, schedule the virus scan during hours when you aren't asking your computer to perform intense processes (like producing a Captivate project).

Clear Captivate's Preferences: If Captivate is performing strangely, you can delete the Preferences folder and see if that shakes things up. Close Captivate, find the Preferences folder on your computer (see below) and then restart Captivate. The Preferences folder will be recreated when Captivate starts. If you are nervous about deleting the Preferences folder, make a backup of the folder first and copy it to a trusted location. Then delete the original.

Looking to learn Captivate quickly? We offer two live, online classes. Adobe Captivate Essentials and Adobe Captivate Beyond the Essentials (Advanced).