Tag Archives: Captivate

iBooks, the future of course material?

Posted by on January 27, 2012 No comments

If you are in the training and learning business, you know that course material always has been the subject of many discussions. Some say it is necessary, others say that they are never used, but most students want “a manual”. Entire forests disappeared because of it, the added value of it is uncertain.

What if you could avoid using paper, and make the manual really deliver added value? I spent some time playing with iBooks author, a manual in Word format about an IT application, and Adobe Captivate software demo’s, to see if this could be a valuable alternative.

The workflow to replace all your paper based manuals by this solution would be:

  • Get yourself a Mac :–)
  • Get yourself an iPad if you want to preview your iBooks
  • Download a copy of iBooks author
  • Import your Word document into iBooks author
  • Publish your Captivate demo’s as .mp4 (standard publish function in CP 5 and higher)
  • Convert your .mp4 files to .m4v with QuickTime
  • Insert the demos in your iBook using the Media widget
  • Add some interactivity if necessary, e.g. multiple choice questions
  • Publish your project
  • Distribute your iBook (via the store or as a file)
  • Get an iPad for all your students :–)

I will let you judge for yourself. This is the result:

How to publish a Captivate project to a SharePoint site

Posted by on December 23, 2011 No comments

Microsoft SharePoint is an interesting platform if you quickly want to publish your e-learning content. These are the steps to publish an Adobe Captivate project to a SharePoint site:

1. Publish your Captivate project as Flash(SWF), and make sure that you have the option Export to html checked. This will produce a set of files: a .html file, a .swf file and a .js file.

2. Upload these files into a document library on a SharePoint site. You can start your project by clicking on the .html file.
If you are running SharePoint 2010 and the file does not open, you might need to change a security setting in SharePoint. Also, SharePoint has a default file size limit of 50 MB. Your system administrator can increase this limit.

3. Optional, but recommended: to make it easier for your users to start your course, you can include a link to the .html file on the home page of your site.

Watch the demonstration below for more detailed instructions:

 

Upgrading an Adobe Captivate 3 project to Captivate 5

Posted by on November 17, 2010 No comments

There seems to be a lot of confusion about upgrading projects created with Adobe Captivate 3 to Adobe Captivate 5. I did some tests today, and these are my conclusions:

  • You can upgrade files from Captivate 3 to Captivate 5. However, you can not “go back” and do a “save as Captivate previous version”, because the Captivate 5 file format is different;
  • When I tried to publish an upgraded project, it did not work, the result showed just a black screen. This was because the project I tried contained “text animations”, and there is an known issue with these. Adobe published a fix for this issue.

After applying the fix, all worked well.

Issues with Adobe Captivate 4 and Windows 7 64-bit

Posted by on June 11, 2010 No comments

I am running Captivate 4 on a Windows 7 64-bit operating system, and this does not seem to be a good idea; although most of the functionality works fine, I am having problems editing items in the library. E.g. when I try to edit a background with Paint or another graphics application, it opens the background, but when I save my changes, Captivate hangs. It does this consistently, and it has been confirmed as an issue by other users (see http://forums.adobe.com/message/2887534). Other users are even reporting issues with capturing 64 bit applications.

So for now, if you want to use full functionality of Captivate and you have a choice between Windows 7 32 or 64 bit, I would go for 32 bit. Lets hope that everything will be fixed in Captivate 5 or with the next update.

Converting Captivate screencasts to Silverlight

Posted by on November 28, 2009 No comments

Recently, I had to produce screencasts that needed to be published/played in a Microsoft Silverlight player. I know, most people are still using the very popular Flash format, but sometimes there are reasons why you need to use Silverlight. For instance because it needs to be published on a Microsoft platform. ;–)

The trouble is that this requires your movies to be in .wmv format. Captivate currently ony produces Flash output (of course).

If you are starting from scratch, you can use a screencasting tool that produces .wmv files directly. You can use Camtasia Studio, or Microsofts Expression Encoder 3. This will give you a nice .wmv file that you can then embed in your authoring tool, or play directly with a Silverlight player (e.g. the free one on Codeplex.).

But what if you have tons of Captivate movies ready to be published? Or if you like Captivate better than Camtasia? Well, no worries, you can follow these steps:

  1. Remove the “interactive” elements from your Captivate movies. This includes buttons, playback controls, question slides, anything a user can click on. This is important, otherwise your conversion will fail.
  2. Publish your project  and get the .swf file.
  3. Convert the .swf file to .wmv. I used Camtasia to do that (via Import media you can import an .swf file, and publish your project as .wmv), but I heard of other people using tools like Prism to do this.
  4. Integrate the .wmv in your Silverlight authoring tool or in your player.
  5. Done!

You can view an example of the final result. Requires the Silverlight Player (duh!).

Any tips or tricks? Share them in the comments!