So many widgets, so little time
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WidgetFactory 6.1

Just released a new version of WidgetFactory that will work with Captivate 6.1. Currently any widgets built with WidgetFactory build with a version under 6.1 will not work with Captivate, so make sure you update your widgets.

Click here to get the update

A couple of changes have come in with Captivate 6.1 which will cause issues with some widgets. For one, most slide objects now have mouseEnabled and mouseChildren turned off. This means that if you’ve attached a CLICK mouse event to one, then no matter how much you click it the event won’t dispatch. To get around this, WidgetFactory’s getSlideObjectByName() method now turns on the mouseEnabled and mouseChildren properties before returning you the slide object. However, there will probably be various issues with this to come. For example, if at runtime you’ve got a button INSIDE your widget that you want the audience to press, that won’t work out of the box in CP 6.1, because the widget itself has had its mouseEnabled and mouseChildren properties turned off. You’ll have to cycle up the widget’s parents and make sure those two properties are set to true on each parent.

There is currently a known issue with Captivate 6.1 to do with Interactive Widgets. If you place an interactive widget on the first frame of a slide, then everything is fine. However, if you move it off that frame to… say frame 30, then the Interactive Widget will NOT pause the movie, and it will NOT report success or failure. All the code in the widget runs fine, there just seems to be some bug in Captivate that stops this happening. There’s not really anything we can do about it on the Widget developer end, so if you get inquiries about this, just tell the customer that for the moment they’ll have to start the interactive widget from the first frame of the slide. Here’s hoping there’s a patch coming out for this soon.

Aside from that, getSlideObjectByName() will now return objects that have been ‘displayed for rest of project’; which is a nice overdue feature. There are also some bug fixes, mostly fixing some issues widgets had with Question Pools.

Hopefully this will clear your collective headache of all the 6.1 customers sending you e-mails saying: It don’t work!

Loading Items from the Captivate Library – Part 2

As promised, you can now watch part 2 of the tutorial for loading objects from the Captivate library into your widgets.

If you missed part 1, you can see it here.

This part of the tutorial deals with the External and Embedded Resource Lists, and how to load library objects into other widget modes.

Loading Items from the Captivate Library – Part 1

Edit: See part 2 here.

I have finally made a tutorial on loading stuff from the Captivate Library! This is by far the most exciting new feature in Captivate 6 as far as widgets are concerned. Unfortunately in all the time since CP6 was released, I haven’t put up a tutorial on how to do it. So finally the silence is broken! And it is broken in video! Which is a good thing, because technically a blog post is not an audible format, thereby silence would not have been broken that way.

mzmnt~

N-E-WAY, here’s the tutorial.

Hopefully I’ll have part 2 up soon where I explain how you can register which library objects you want to access at runtime.

Till then, happy loading from the library!

How to Access Captivate Variables in CP6 (When not using WidgetFactory)

I get asked this question a lot, so I thought I’d make a video on it.

How to Access Captivate Variables in CP6 if you’re using the Adobe Widget Template.

I’m Using an Animation

If you’re using an animation or for some reason do not have access to cpSetValue, then don’t worry, everything’s not lost. The getMovieProps() function is available two parents up from the animation’s main timeline. So just use this code:

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captivateVariables = Object(parent.parent).getMovieProps().variablesHandle;

New Widgets and WidgetFactory 6.0.4!

We’re back from Devlearn! We had a great time meeting up with all of you over there and showing off our new widgets. Speaking of showing off our new widgets, let me show off our new widgets.

Have I sufficiently shown off our new widgets yet?

Good. Allow me now to show off something else.

WidgetFactory 6.0.4

Get it here

There was a small issue that crept up for WidgetFactory in the latest patch for Captivate, so this release is mainly to resolve that issue. There are also a few new util classes if you’re interested, but the main new toy in this release is wildcards.

Wildcards

Okay, so here’s the problem. You want to work with slide objects right? However, you also want your widget to be placed on a Master slide. BUT, Master Slide objects don’t have item names right? RIGHT! And they still don’t. So… No I don’t have a solution for reliably grabbing master slide objects yet. HOWEVER, we now have a reliable solution for widgets on master slides grabbing objects on slides attached to that master slide.

Okay here’s the concept. You’ve built a mouse cursor widget. Well actually I’ve built a mouse cursor widget. I showed it off on the video above. But for the sake of argument you’re developing this mouse cursor widget. You place this widget on the master slide. You attach that master slide to every slide you want to display a custom mouse cursor on. Then on each attached slide you place the graphic that you wish to appear as the mouse cursor. However, in your widget you don’t want the user to have to define the item name for each object on each slide, so what you do is this: Give the cursor a name of ‘@_cursor’. Then for the mouse cursor graphics on each slide, add ‘_cursor’ to the end of the item name.

You may see where I’m going with this.

getSlideObject() now has an optional third parameter where you can specify a wildcard character. So let’s take the above example. To grab a slide object with a ‘_cursor’ syntax, you’d write it like this:

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var myCursor:Sprite = getSlideObjectByName("@_cursor", -1, "@");

getSlideObjectByName will return to you the first object it can find that matches your wildcard name.

BUT! What if you wanted to get ALL the objects on slide that match your wildcard name? In that case, use the new getSlideObjectsByWildCardName() method (yes I know, it’s a long name). This function returns an array of slide objects that match your query.

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var myCursors:Array = getSlideObjectsByWildCardName("@_cursor", "@");

In the above code, myCursors now contains an array full of every object on slide that has ‘_cursor’ at the end of its item name. This saves a lot of headache for your widget users and it’s not all that much of a pain to implement is it?

So try the new wildcard today!

The Future

I’ll be pretty busy working on our new widgets for a while. There may be another WidgetFactory release in the near future to clean up some issues that we’ve been receiving about review mode.

Also, since going to Devlearn we got a lot of requests for HTML5 versions of our widgets. Currently only static widgets can be built in HTML5 and we only have one up for sale at the moment. There are rumors going around that support for the other widget types will soon be added to Captivate. So if/when that happens, we’ll be jumping on the band wagon and releasing HTML5 versions of our Drag and Drop widgets pronto. And a HTML5 Drag and Drop widget is going to need a HTML5 WidgetFactory.

We’re also thinking of releasing more YouTube tutorials for Captivate. So it’s possible you may see less written blogs and more video training on developing widgets coming out here.

So that’s where I’m at! Have a good day and if you get the chance – eat a pineapple.