Recent News Items

Online Tutorials for Adobe Captivate

Submitted by Rod Ward on Fri, 04/15/2011 - 11:48

This section contains advanced tips, tricks, tutorials, and blog articles related to creating more sophisticaed e-learning courses with Adobe e-learning tools such as Captivate, Flash, Photoshop, and the Adobe E-learning Suite.

Drag and Drop Lite Widget Updated for Cp 5.5

Submitted by Rod Ward on Mon, 06/13/2011 - 09:27

Our popular Drag and Drop Lite Question Widget for Adobe Captivate has several important features related to how it handles quizzing and quiz review. New customers can purchase the latest version widget here.

One very important feature is a Review tab that enables Captivate developers to finally control the text that appears in the Quiz Review area.

We want ideas for enhancements to Captivate 6!!

Submitted by Rod Ward on Mon, 12/13/2010 - 22:05

The Cp6 development cycle will be kicking off anytime now (if it hasn't already) and I wanted to give all Captivate users on the planet the opportunity to contribute and vote for ideas about how to make Cp6 better than any previous version.

So, I've just started a new website to gather enhancement ideas for Captivate 6: http://captivate6ideas.ideascale.com/

With this site the best ideas bubble to the top of the list because they collect the most votes! If it proves popular, perhaps this site will enable people that actually use Captivate to show which features they REALLY want to see in the next version of this great e-learning application.

Sizer - An Essential Tool for Captivate Developers

Submitted by Rod Ward on Mon, 11/22/2010 - 10:49

In this post I explain the benefits of a great little freeware application called Sizer, which allows Captivate developers to instantly resize any application or browser window to an exact, predefined size. You can download this wonderfully usefull app here: http://www.brianapps.net/sizer/

How to Beat Captivate's Interactive Catch 22

Submitted by Rod Ward on Wed, 11/17/2010 - 11:54

Have you ever tried to create a software simulation in Captivate 4 or 5 that enabled a rollover effect, a double-mouse-click, and a right-mouse-click all at exactly the same location on a slide? Up till now it's been impossible to achieve due to competing limitations of Captivate's default interactive objects. Now a widget makes it possible to respond to up to seven (7) different mouse events from the same Captivate object!

View the working example here. For the full story on how this was created, read on...

Using Blooms Taxonomy to Design Drag and Drop E-learning Interactions

Submitted by Rod Ward on Mon, 11/15/2010 - 15:00

In this article I provide some suggestions on how to develop concepts for drag and drop questions or interactions in Adobe Captivate using an instructional design tool which has been around since the 1950's...Blooms Taxonomy of Performance Verbs.

Flash player 10.1.102.64 conflicts with Captivate 5 text animations

Submitted by Rod Ward on Wed, 11/10/2010 - 09:26

Yesterday when I logged into my trusty laptop I saw the invitation to upgrade to a new version of Flash player. Since I create elearning content with Adobe Captivate as SWF files, I readily accepted.

Normally Flash player upgrades are good for my content because they usually improve the playback experience. Not this time.

WidgetFactory 5.0 Release

Submitted by Tristan on Mon, 08/09/2010 - 16:47

As you've probably guessed, WidgetFactory 5's main feature is that it fully supports Captivate 5 and all the new widgety features that come with it (see below). However, the good news is that it is still fully compatible with Captivate 4. In fact, many of the new features in WidgetFactory 5 work with Captivate 4 as well.

If you're too excited to read further, and just have to download it right now, here's the link:

Download WidgetFactory from Google Code!

WidgetFactory 5 Update

Submitted by Tristan on Fri, 07/16/2010 - 23:03

Just a message to all you Widget miesters out there. I know you're all itching for a new CP5 version of WidgetFactory, and I'm here to say you won't have long to wait now. A release candidate for WidgetFactory Version 5 (Numbers 2-4 were too 'unhip' for us) has just gone out to the testers! I can also confirm to you that WidgetFactory 5 will be entirely compatible with Captivate 4, aside from the new Captivate 5 Widget features, such as the new CaptivateEvents and custom Widget Parameters size. This means that one Widget file will work in both versions of Captivate. In areas where you may need to do things differently depending on the Captivate Version (such as a smaller interface for the Captivate 4 Widget Parameters tab), there are properties that will allow you to differentiate between them. Aside from that, WidgetFactory is now on Twitter! If you want to keep up with the latest news on widgets, follow WidgetFactory now! Tristan,

ActionScript 3.0 Course Available for Purchase!

Submitted by Tristan on Sun, 08/16/2009 - 19:15

Greetings people! A few posts ago you may recall I alluded to finishing a rather sizeable course that would be available to the general public. Well it's finally here, and we are happy to announce the release of Boulder Dodge with Object Oriented Programming! This course was a joint venture between Infosemantics and well known training website CartoonSmart. CartoonSmart specialises in courses for Adobe Flash (Although recently they've started branching out into other products). I personally learnt Flash from CartoonSmart, so I was very happy to give something back. This course is about ActionScript (the coding language behind Adobe Flash), specifically the ins and outs of writing ActionScript as classes, and how to take advantage of the Object Oriented Programming abilities they provide you. In order to teach you this, throughout the course we progressively build a game called Boulder Dodge (heh, heh, heh). You can play it here.