Technical Communications – Page 7

July 23, 2014

Adobe Captivate 8: Geolocation

by Kevin Siegel

You can create an eLearning lesson that changes dependent upon where your learners are physically located. For instance, you can create a Captivate project for learners who live in the United States or Australia. While much of the course content is relevant to both Americans and Australians, thanks to Captivate's geolocation feature, learners in both countries will see unique, location-specific, information while taking the same course.

The first step to adding geolocation features to a project is creating the project as you normally would. In the example that follows, I've created a project for learners in Asia and the United States. (I created the project as a branching scenario… the first half of the project was for learners in the United States, the second half was for learners in Asia.)

Once you've created the project for both audiences, adding the geolocation features is very easy. First, choose Window > Mobile Palette to open the Mobile Palette dialog box.

Select Geolocation and then click the OK button.

Next, you'll need the Latitude and Longitude of the locations you'll use in your project. As I mentioned above, my two locations are Asia and the US. While determining Latitude and Longitude might sound difficult, I simply asked Google the following: "what is the lat and long for the united states?" The answer, rounded to whole numbers, was 38 and 77.

I repeated the same question for Asia (and ended up with aLatitude and Longitude of 48 and 86).

Now that you've got the Latitudes and Longitudes figured out, you'll need to create one variable for each location (via Project > Variables). When creating each variable, select Geolocation and you'll have access to a Lat, Long, and Accfields. The Acc value is based on how close you want the learner to be to the latitude and longitude location; it is based on meters. Think about the meters surrounding the area like a large circle. When building your course, consider starting with 1,000,000 meters, which will allow anyone within range to still be able to access the course.

The final step (besides publishing) is to create an Advanced Action (via Project > Advanced Action) and attach it to a Filmstrip slide.

Set the Action Type to Conditional actions and name the action GeoLocation.

Double-click the first column under the IF Statement, click the word variable, and select cpInfoGeoLocation.

Adobe Captivate: CpInfoGeoLocation variable

Note: The CpInfoGeoLocation variable ships with Adobe Captivate 8.

To the right of "is equal to," click the word variable from the drop-down, choose one of your location variables you created earlier.

Under Actions, double-click in the first column and chooseJump to Slide. From the next menu, select the slide in your project where you want your learner to end up. I selected the Asian branch in my project (I called it Asia Scenario).

At the bottom of the dialog box, click Else. Under Actions, double-click the first column and choose Jump to Slide. In the next column, choose your other location (in my case, it was the other branch I called US Scenario). Save the action (as an Action) and then close the dialog box.

Adobe Captivate: Jump to the other location.

Attach the GeoLocation Advanced Action to the first slide by selecting the slide on the Filmstrip. On the Properties Inspector, select the Actions tab. From the On Enter drop-down menu, choose Execute Advanced Actions and select the GeoLocation action as the Script.

Publish your lesson and post it to your web server or LMS like you would we any Captivate eLearning lesson. When users in Asia access the lesson, the GeoLocation script will automatically display the Asian content (and vice versa for US-based learners). In a word, that's awesome!

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Looking for instructor-led training on Adobe Captivate? Check out our live, online, instructor-led Captivate classes.

July 16, 2014

Adobe Captivate 8: Changing the Size of Responsive Layouts

by Kevin Siegel

As far as I'm concerned, the hottest new feature you'll find in Adobe Captivate 8 is the ability to create responsive eLearning. As I taught you a few weeks ago, by choosing File > New > Responsive Project, you can basically create and work on multiple screen sizes (called break points) in one project. When you publish the responsive project, the learner will automatically be served the break point appropriate for the device they're using.

If you've spent any time creating Responsive Projects, you've probably noticed that there are three breakpoints in the project by default: Primary (set to a width of 1024 pixels), Tablet (set to a width of 768 pixels), and Mobile (set to a width of 360 pixels). The default breakpoints are based on typical sizes of a laptop (Primary), iPad (Tablet), and iPhone (Mobile). However, you can easily adjust the size of the breakpoints.

To begin, open the CloudAir_SoftSkills Sample.cptx sample project that ships with Captivate 8. (On the right side of the Captivate 8 Welcome screen, click the Sample Projects/Tutorials icon.)

Adobe Captivate 8: Sample Projects icon.

The project is responsive. Notice the colored ribbon at the top of the canvas; this is a breakpoint within Captivate (a breakpoint is the point at which the layout changes size to accommodate a different screen size).

To change the width of a layout, select one of the three breakpoints and drag either slide to change the width.

Adobe Captivate 8: Change the width of a breakpoint.

See, I told you it was easy. Now for the height.

The option to adjust a layout's height is disabled by default so that you don't accidentally change it. Each layout's default height provides space for Captivate's playbar. If you are not going to use a playbar in the published lesson, you should adjust the height accordingly.

To begin, it's a good idea to change your magnification to 75% (View > Magnification). If you are too close to the canvas, you will not be able to see the new height you are about to set. I've found that 75% is almost always the perfect magnification for me, but you may need to fiddle around a bit to find the prefect magnification for your display.

In the upper right of the canvas, select View Device Height.

From the bottom of the canvas, drag the Height Adjuster (the yellow rectangle in the image below) up or down to change the device Height.

Note: The shortest you can make any device is 100 pixels; the tallest you can make any device is 1,000 pixels.

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Looking for instructor-led training on Adobe Captivate? Check out our live, online, instructor-led Captivate classes.

July 11, 2014

Adobe Captivate: Removing Popups from Video Demos

by Kevin Siegel

I'm continuing to enjoy developing eLearning using the new Adobe Captivate 8. And the more I use this updated version, the more I find subtle improvements and new features. Take video demos for instance. I use the video demo recording mode frequently (it's the mode I use for the videos I upload to YouTube).

While recording a recent video, I noticed a new tab on the Video Effects Inspector: Popup.

It just so happened that I had recorded a video and had inadvertently captured a yellow tooltip (shown in the image below). I figured this would be the perfect opportunity to test the Cleanup button on the Popup tab.

On the Timeline, I positioned the playhead at the part of the video where the popup first appeared.

On the Video Effects Inspector, I selected the Popup tab
and clicked the Cleanup button.

On the slide, I drew a rectangle around the popup.

Note: When you try this at home, don't worry if your rectangle doesn't completely cover the popup. If your rectangle is too large or small at first, you can resize it using the resizing handles at any time. You can also drag the rectangle via its borders to move it to a different location on the video.

Once I drew the popup area on the video, a Popup object was added to the Timeline. I stretched the right edge of the Popup object to the amount of time I wanted it to remain onscreen on the slide; then I clicked the word Cleanup on the video.

And just like that, the area within the popup rectangle I drew was removed from the video.

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Looking for instructor-led training on Adobe Captivate? Check out our live, online, instructor-led Captivate classes.

July 2, 2014

Adobe Captivate: Record Simulations Using Smart Shapes Instead of Text Captions

by Kevin Siegel

Text Captions have been available in Adobe Captivate since before Captivate was Captivate (think RoboDemo). While there's nothing terribly wrong with Text Captions, you're a bit limited when it comes to editing the way they look.

Take the Text Caption shown below for example. The arrow in the upper left of the caption is known as a callout.

You can control a few attributes of the callout (you can use the Properties Inspector to select from a list of pre-determined positions and you can elect not to show the callout). But if you want to fully adjust the callout (perhaps move it a bit to the left or right, or make the callout a bit longer), you're out of luck.

Many Captivate developers, tired of the limitations of standard Text Captions, have forsaken Text Captions altogether for Smart Shapes. In the image below, I'm using a Rectangle Smart Shape. The shape looks much like a Standard Text Caption. I can control its appearance via Object Styles. However, check out how I am able to drag the shape's callout by dragging the yellow square. You can't do that with a Text Caption.

Adobe Captivate: The callout in a Smart Shape can easily be adjusted.

Because Text Captions are really bitmap images, I'm not able to fully control how the captions look unless I edit the bitmaps using an image editing program. With Smart Shapes, you can control just about every aspect of the way the shape looks by combining options found on the Properties Inspector with Object Styles.

While there is much to love about Smart Shapes, a perceived downside to Smart Shapes is that you can't use them to automatically get captions when recording a Software Simulation. You'll be happy to learn that you can, in fact, use Smart Shapes instead of Text Captions during the recording process.

Display Captivate's Preferences (Windows users, choose Edit > Preferences; Mac users, choose Adobe Captivate > Preferences). Choose a recording mode and, from the Captions area, select Use Smart Shapes instead of Captions.

Adobe Captivate: Use Smart Shapes instead of Captions.

At that point, you'll be able to select the Smart Shape Type you'd like to use during the recording process.

Click the OK button to close the Preferences dialog box and you're done. The next time you record a Software Simulation, the project will automatically contain Smart Shapes instead of Text Captions.

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Looking for instructor-led training on Adobe Captivate? Check out our live, online, instructor-led Captivate classes.

June 24, 2014

Adobe FrameMaker: On-Demand QR Codes

by Kevin Siegel

Unless you've been deliberately avoiding them, it's a good bet you've come across images similar to the one below.

QR Code leading to the IconLogic website.

The image is known as a QR code. As you can see, QR codes are images that are made up of black and white squares. They are typically used for storing URLs or other information and can be scanned by QR Readers. In fact, if you have a smart phone, it may already have a QR Scanner. If so, scan the image above with the QR Reader and you'll be taken to the IconLogic website.

There's plenty of software you can find on the Internet that will allow you to create your own QR codes (some are free; some will cost you a few bucks). However, if you own Adobe FrameMaker 12, you have that ability to create QR Codes right now.

Open or create a FrameMaker document and click where you want the QR code.
Choose Special > Generate QR Code to open the QR Code Builder.
In the File Name field, give the QR code a name (it will be saved as a PNG image) and specify a storage location.
From the Type drop-down menu, select the type of QR Code you'd like to create (you can select from SMS, URL, Phone, Email, and Text).
In the image below, I selected URL from the Type drop-down menu and then typed the IconLogic website URL.
The final step is to set the size of the URL from the Size drop-down menu. (You can select a size from the Image Dimensions drop-down menu or type your own value into the Image Dimensions field.)
Click the Insert button to insert the QR Code into the FrameMaker document.

And that's that. If you only wanted to use the QR Code in your FrameMaker document, you're done. However, if you want to use the QR Code in a different program, or include it in a newsletter like I did above, you'll find the QR Code image file in the folder you specified when you named the image (see step 3 above).

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Looking for instructor-led training on Adobe FrameMaker? Check out our live, online, instructor-led FrameMaker classes.

June 19, 2014

Microsoft PowerPoint: Measurement Unit Conversion in a Flash

by AJ Walther

Here's a quick tip you may not already know that could save you some serious time with unit conversion. By default, PowerPoint measures in inches. But, if you're using PowerPoint as a design tool you might wish to work in pixels or centimeters. It isn't rocket science to Google your way to proper unit conversion, but there's an easier and faster way right there in PowerPoint.

For example, let's resize a shape using pixel dimensions. We want our final shape size to be 600 pixels high and 800 pixels wide.

In PowerPoint, insert a rectangle (Insert > Illustrations > Shapes > Rectangle).
Right-click the rectangle and choose Size and Position. (The Format Shape dialog box will open with the Size category selected. Notice the Height and Width fields are pre-populated with the current size of the shape inches.)
Ensure Lock aspect ratio is deselected.
Highlight the measurement in the Height field and type 600px followed by the [tab] key. (The Height will automatically be converted to 6.25 inches.)
Highlight the measurement in Width field and type 800px followed by the [tab] key. (The Width will automatically be converted to 8.33 inches.)

The same method can be used for centimeters. In the Height and Width fields, type your desired size followed by cm and press the [tab] key. Presto! Automatic conversion to inches!

June 18, 2014

Adobe Captivate 8: More is More

by Kevin Siegel

Last week I told you about the great enhancements you'll see in Adobe Captivate 8 when it comes to image buttons. This week, I'm going to show you a few more improvements that I think you'll love.

Sample Projects/Tutorials

The first thing you'll see when you start Captivate is the Welcome screen. From this position, you can create a new project, record a software simulation/demonstration, or access recent projects. But take a look in the upper right of the Welcome screen and you'll see an awesome addition: Sample Projects/Tutorials (shown below, it's located in the upper right of the Welcome screen).

Granted, the icon to access the projects and tutorials is easy to miss; but once clicked, a dialog box opens and you'll have access to some really nice sample projects. The sample projects are shown first, followed by several tutorials.

Adobe Captivate: Sample projects and tutorials

If you have already opened or created a project, you will find a Sample Projects/Tutorials icon via the top of the Captivate window (to the right of the Help menu).

However, clicking the icon from here is different than clicking it on the Welcome screen. If you click the icon while in a project, you'll be taken online to Adobe KnowHow, where you'll find some free and pay-for-access training videos.

Characters and Agents

I love the Characters feature added to Captivate a few years ago, which allows you to insert images/guides within a project. And I was delighted to see that not only did Adobe keep Characters in Captivate 8, they've added quite a few. To add a Character, choose Media > Characters. Select a Category, select a character, and then double-click a pose to insert the character onto a slide.

Lastly, check out the Speech Agents (via Audio > Speech Management). Previous versions of Captivate included five Text to Speech Agents. You'll be happy to see that Captivate 8 bumps that number up to seven. New to the team are James and Yumi. I was particularly impressed with how good James sounded… a nice upgrade from Paul (sorry Paul). And Yumi covers you if you need audio for Korean eLearners.

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Looking for instructor-led training on the top eLearning tools? We offer live, online training on Adobe Captivate, Articulate Storyline, Adobe Presenter, and TechSmith Camtasia Studio. We can also bring the same great training onsite to your facility. Interested? Contact us for details.

June 6, 2014

Adobe RoboHelp: Show Variables in Topics

by Willam Van Weelden

In previous articles you've learned about RoboHelp's User Defined Variables (how to create them, group them, and use them in topic titles).

As a brief review, variables can contain information that occurs frequently in your project, such as a product name, company name, or copyright notice. After creating the variable, you can insert it into any RoboHelp topic or onto a template by simply dragging and dropping. Now here's the cool part. Assume your company name now appears throughout your project and now you want to change it. Without the variable, you would have to search your entire project and update the company name. Thanks to variables, all you will need to do is update the definition of the CompanyName variable, and you will change the displayed company name project-wide in just a few seconds.

One issue you'll come across when inserting variables within a topic is that, by default, the variable text looks like regular topic text. In the picture below, I challenge you to locate the variable.

Adobe RoboHelp: Find the variable text

Did you find the variable text? I'm betting that the answer is no. So what's the big deal? This can be particularly frustrating if you need to replace regular text with a variable. For example, you can highlight regular text in a topic and convert it to a variable by dragging the variable on top of the text. That's an awesome feature. Before I begin however, I need to be able to tell, at a glance, if the text I'm looking to replace is already a variable. As it stands, I have no idea since I cannot tell the difference between a variable and regular text.

Luckily, RoboHelp has a handy feature that allows you to distinguish between variables and regular text in topics. To enable this feature, simply choose View > Show > Fields.

Adobe RoboHelp: Color coding for Variable Text.

Voila. All variables in topics are now shown as green text. Best of all, variables only show up green in your project… when you generate a layout, the green color will not be visible to your users.

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Looking for instructor-led training on RoboHelp? We offer live, online training once each month. We can also bring the same great training onsite to your facility. Interested? Contact us for details.

June 5, 2014

Adobe Captivate 8: Responsive Projects for mLearning

by Kevin Siegel

Creating eLearning for mobile devices was high on the wish list a few years ago when Adobe asked users for the top features they'd like to see added to Adobe Captivate. It wasn't long before Adobe responded by adding HTML5 as a publishing option. HTML5 allowed developers to create interactive content that can be used by mobile learners who have a device that does not support Flash.

Publishing HTML5 solved the issue of creating interactive eLearning on the iPad. But there remained another problem. The size of the screen that learners use can vary widely. Your eLearning lesson might look perfect on a desktop system but might be too small when viewed on a small device (such as a smart phone). To accommodate the many screen sizes, your only recourse was to develop several Captivate projects, sized specifically to work on each screen size. Of course that also meant that you'd have to edit and update several projects. No thanks!

Adobe Captivate 8 now allows you to create responsive projects. During the development process, you can basically create and work on multiple screen sizes (called break points) in one project. When you publish the responsive project, the learner will automatically be served the break point appropriate for the device they're using. This one Captivate 8 feature is the main, compelling reason that upgrading to Captivate 8 isn't just something to consider… it's mandatory if your mission is to create eLearning for desktop and mobile users.

To create a responsive project, double-click Responsive Project on the Welcome screen or choose File > New > Responsive Project.

Developing a responsive project is pretty much the same as developing a standard project, but there's one notable difference–breakpoints. By default, new projects contain three breakpoints for the most common screen sizes (for desktop users, tablet users, and smart phone users). You can click each of the breakpoints to see how the layout changes dependent upon the size of the canvas.

In the images below, I've selected each of the default break points I was given in my new project (you can create as many break points as you need and edit existing break points at any time).

Adobe Captivate: Breakpoint for a desktop user.

Adobe Captivate: Breakpoint for a tablet user.

Adobe Captivate: Layout for a smart phone

In the images below, you can see a responsive project developed by Anita Horsley, and how she designed each canvas to work best with each of her break points. (As you review each image, pay particular attention to the position of the character as each break point is selected.)

Desktop user: 1024 pixels wide.

Tablet user: 768 pixels wide.

Mobile user: 360 pixels

Once you're done laying out each canvas, all you need to do is publish and post the lesson to a web server or LMS just like always. When the lesson is accessed by your learner, the lesson will automatically detect the learner's screen size and the correct canvas will be displayed. Awesome!

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Want to learn more about creating responsive projects? Join our3-hour mini course on creating Responsive Layouts with Adobe Captivate.

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June 2, 2014

Writing & Grammar: Qualifying Possessives

by Jennie Ruby

A frequent reader of this column, Michael Stein, sent in an interesting question about the possessives we have discussed here recently:

Perhaps you could address possessives again in an upcoming column. Specifically, how should a qualifier be added concerning a person in a sentence who possesses something. For example, "We played with John's, the kid who lives in the white house, ball." Is this correct?

Here are my thoughts on this gnarly problem. In his email to me, Michael observed that in the spoken language, we would say,

We played with John, the kid in the white house's ball.

And in fact, there is a sound grammatical grounding for that.

A description in commas right after a name is called an "appositive." The Gregg Reference Manual, my favorite guide for such things, says to add the possessive to the end of the appositive and omit the trailing comma that would ordinarily belong there. The examples, however, are short, as in these:

Washington, DC's streets

Joe the plumber's bill

But I think that in a professional writing context, or with longer appositives, this falls apart and becomes awkward and possibly even confusing:

We saved the file in Tim, the manager for the project's shared folder.

Yech. And is it the project's folder, or Tim's folder? And the way this comes out, it actually means that Tim is not the manager of the project but just of the project's folder. Even the Gregg says to rewrite such sentences to avoid the awkwardness.

So we pretty much have to go for the re-write in order to both identify the person and make the person clearly possessive:

We saved the file in the shared folder belonging to Tim, the manager for the project.

We saved the file in the folder shared by Tim, the manager for the project.

Or (and I don't dislike this one as much as Michael does)

We saved the file in Tim's shared folder. Tim is the manager for the project.

Long-time readers may sense a pattern here: for many of these awkward, confusing grammar and punctuation conundrums, my solution is to rewrite the sentence. No sentence is sacred. Every sentence can be rewritten. Keep rewriting until everything is correct and works smoothly.

Challenge: Rewrite Around Awkwardness

Margie, my sister in Baltimore's house has a sump pump.
The tree with the hanging swing's strong limb is beginning to bend.
The day on which her son is to graduates's date is May 30.
The cabin with the gravel driveway's fishpond overflowed last week.
The golf cart with the broken wheel's driver was not injured in the crash.

As always, please post your answers as comments below.

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Answers to the challenge on single quotation marks are brought to you by Jenny Zoffuto. Her clean-looking examples for numbers 1, 4, and 5 come from not giving special treatment to the defined word when the sentence is clear without it.

In a client-side application, the accessing computer does the calculations.
The instructor said; "As Laura LeMay stated in the assigned reading, 'For more control over your sounds, you'll need different software.'"
Her boyfriend said, "The top song on my favorite radio channel says, 'You are perfect in my mind,' and I think it is talking about you!"
"The Wicked Ale effect," according to my colleague, "Is a marketing technique for covering several media at the same time."
A picture placed directly in the text, rather than floating, is called an in-line graphic.

Alternative correct answers came in from Kay Honaker. Notice what she did with the Wicked Ale example (no. 4). The single quotes are not the British usage, but are in fact what happens to double-quotes when they occur inside of an already double-quoted sentence. Nicely done!

In a "client-side" [or client-side] application, the accessing computer does the calculations.
The instructor said, "As Laura LeMay stated in the assigned reading, 'For more control over your sounds, you'll need different software.'"
Her boyfriend said, "The top song on my favorite radio channel says, 'You are perfect in my mind,' and I think it is talking about you!"
"The 'Wicked Ale effect,'" according to my colleague, "is a marketing technique for covering several media at the same time." [also could be done without quoting the colleague, and just putting quotes on the defined word]
A picture placed directly in the text, rather than floating, is called an "in-line" graphic.

Correct answers also came in from Ginny Supranowitz. And I missed one from last time: Ginny should have been listed as a winner on the British spelling challenge. Thanks for letting me know!