Intro Happy New Year 2017 to all Captivate users! Quite a while ago I wrote an article about Timeline secrets in Captivate 5: Tiny Timeline Tidbits Since the change in the UI with Captivate 8 , the newbie User Interface minimizes the Timeline panel by default which is really a pity (personal opinion). Some of the questions I read, at least partially due to that decision to hide the Timeline: ‘I want to get rid of the timeline, don’t need it […]
Introduction In a previous blog post I explained the ins and outs of the new Advanced Actions dialog box. If you feel confused about my terminology in this more practical blog post, please read that first article. A decision block of type ‘While’ is totally new in version 2017. It has some similarities with the Conditional decision block (IF, Then, Else) but offers new possibilities as you’ll see in this simple game. The While loop can be used to create […]
Intro With Captivate 9 multistate objects was one of the most welcome new features. In previous versions only buttons and shape buttons had states like ‘Rollover’ (hover) and ‘Down’. Interactive objects like buttons/shape buttons have InBuilt States: ‘Normal’, ‘Rollover’, Down and with Captivate 2017 a fourth InBuilt state was added: ‘Visited’. For all objects, static or interactive, you can create custom states.. Less known is the presence of InBuilt states for all objects in a Drag&Drop slide, both for drag […]
Why this short post? If you have read my article about the 3 most important stumbling blocks for Captivate (newbie) users, you’ll know that Themes are amongst them. The components of themes are described in What’s in a Theme/template. and in this post you’ll learn about he use of Theme colors. Almost daily I see questions, comments on the forums like “I don’t use a theme” which is – sorry for the word – nonsense because every project is based on a theme. The theme […]
Intro Reusability in Captivate is one of this tool’s most amazing features, but a lot of the possibilities (often time-saving) are not very well known by (starting) users. When I mention the word ‘external library’ in a presentation I see a lot of confused eyes among the participants. Even recently, based on an answer on the forums, someone sent me a message: ‘What are you talking about, never heard about external libraries in Captivate, where can I find them?’. Time […]
Title is not an nostalgic reference to the best spreadsheet application ever (Lotus 1-2-3) but is related to… Captivate. The THREE ‘eye buttons’ in Captivate are a source of confusion because they have exactly the same look (contrary to my image above) but show very different functionality. Questions due to that confusion appear not as frequently as the timeline misunderstanding questions, but nevertheless think that a clear explanation could help to dissipate confusion: 1. Eye button on the Timeline This […]
This blog post explains the ins and outs of the new, improved Advanced Actions dialog box. It is valid for CP2017 and more recent versions.
Intro When I posted the article about Pausing the Timeline (part of the sequence of articles about that most important panel), I promised to add some use cases to illustrate using pause and pausing points. Let us start with a simple use case, based on a recent forum question in this thread: Interactive Video Buttons Use Case – description It is clear that the user is not aware of the difference between pausing the timeline by an interactive object (pausing point) and by […]
Intro The origin of this article is (again) due to a forum question: “I want to rotate a triangle around a certain point” using the Rotation effect. It is time to explain the importance of the reference or registration point for objects in Captivate. In other Adobe applications like Illustrator, InDesign, Animate you have lot of control over that point. Look at this small screenshot: it shows that reference point in two different locations. Sorry for the low resolution, it […]
