A while ago, I talked about injecting some life into Captivate quizzes. Well, after being side-tracked long enough, I finally put more time into it and I am almost done. I added most of the expected quiz behaviors and replaced the feedback mechanism with something that  I think is nicer … but I want you to be the judge of this. So, complete the quiz and review your answers at the end.

With this widget, you’ll be able to customize the colors and transparency of the highlight and the font face/size/color. I will also add a few more options like shuffling before releasing it officially. So have a look and let me know what you think!

I finally removed the last known issues with the CpNotepad Widget (Cp5 only). It is  now available for purchase at a price of $24.95 USD. I think that this is a fair price considering that the Widget can be used in almost every courses. Check out the updated demo and make sure you understand the limitations that comes with it. The major limitation is that the Export to HTML functionality can only work when the course is published with Flash Player version 10. If your customer is still stuck with version 9, don’t bother it will not work.

Now, since Christmas is knocking on our doors, I decided to make it a Christmas Launch Special. So instead of the usual price, you get a $10 off so the widget will cost you only $14.95 USD. However, there’s a catch! The rebate will only be applied to the first 5 customers. However, being generous in nature , if you buy the widget before the new year and don’t get the rebate, just e-mail me and we’ll fix that.

Happy Christmas!

It seems that I have a hard time concentrating on finishing CpGears. I always get side tracked to something interesting. A few days ago, James at Mindful by Design was looking at a way to have his users take notes when going through a course. The notes needed to be persisted across sessions and eventually printed. That was enough to get me interested and I ended up being sponsored by James to create a widget that do just that.

The CpNotepad widget offers you a rudimentary text editor to take your notes. They are saved in a Flash Player shared object so that they can be recalled the next time you take the course. For printing, I hit a few brick walls. Printing in Flash is not that great, especially for text that is too big to fit on the screen. I ended up exploiting a Plash Player 10 feature that allows to save a file on the user’s disk. So, I used this approach to export the text and its formatting to an HTML file. The user can then open it up in his favorite browser and print it if he wishes!

I still have to put the final touch and make sure that it’s robust (a few bugs here and there) but you can take a look at it if you wish.

Click here to see the widget in action!

If you see issues with it, please kindly let me know. I will probably put it on sale in a few days. I hope it’s something that will be useful to many

As for finishing CpGears … maybe during the Christmas break?

I have been confronted lately with some important limitations of the Captivate Widget Framework. It seems that Captivate loads the widget’s swf into its own Applicationdomain. An Applicationdomain is basically a container for discrete groups of Class and classes in different ApplicationDomains cannot communicate together. This segregation can sometimes be a good thing but for widget developers, it is a very bad thing!

For one, it prevents us from using Static variables. In one of my widget, I had some plans to have many instances of the widget share a common component. So, I created a Static variable that was supposed to contain the shared component. To my surprise, it looked like the component I modified in one instance of the widget was never available in another instance. It took me a while to realize that the widgets were on their own Applicationdomain.

So, I decided to try to go around this by dynamically attaching the shared component to the CaptivateMainTimeline movieclip. That worked OK until I tried to cast the shared component into its proper type. The debugger welcomed me with an error message saying that the cast was invalid. This is another side effect of having different Applicationdomains. For the Plash Player, when the exact same class definition is loaded into two different Applicationdomains, it is as if it was two different classes; just like if I was to compare an apple with an orange.

Ok, that sucks! I finally was able to do it by casting the shared component into an Object. This way, the compiler ignores the errors. The drawbacks of this is that I lose the capability to use strongly typed variables and I also lose the auto-completion in my IDE. Not a nice tradeoff at all!

So, for those of you would want to share a common component between widget instances, you will have to attach the shared component to the CaptivateMainTimeline and access it through an Object type. The only other solution that I can see is to try to use the EventDispatcher provided by the widget framework to communicate changes.

If Adobe’s developers are reading this, it would be nice to understand why this was done. I would really like the next version of Captivate to load the widgets in the core Applicationdomain so we can start doing powerful stuff.

While looking at my site’s statistics, I realized that the Youtube widget that I made when answering this post was regularly downloaded. However, I never posted it on my site in the Widget section. So, I decided to revamp it a little bit and added some new stuff. For example, you can now properly resize the widget on the stage. I also added many options such as showing related video, looping, autoplay and more.

That was ok until I realized that Youtube doesn’t allow you to embed more than one player in a Flash context. Some people were able to do it but it requires a lot more work and I don’t think I will be putting more time in this widget. Therefore, if you can live with the limitation of having only one youtube video per presentation, then be my guest and download the widget.

Someone on the forum brought back to life an old post to which I contributed when I started to be interested into Captivate. In this post, someone wanted to access the slide’s duration. Since there was no way to get that information directly (… and to my knowledge it’s still the case), I created a small animation that calculated this. The animation was built when Cp4 ruled the earth and now a new user is trying to get it to work in Cp5. It seems that it’s not really working in newest version of Captivate so I decided to take a couple of hours to build a widget for it. So, here is the Slide Duration Widget.

Have fun!

Every tool has its weak spots and I believe that for Captivate, it might just be the question slides … and especially the rendering of the questions themselves. When you compare the quizzes produced by other e-Learning tools, one quickly asserts that Captivate is light-years … behind. Don’t get me wrong, I think that there are good things about the Captivate Quizzing Framework but the end results are not that great. So, I decided that I would try to inject some life into some of the question types. Maybe we can bring Captivate up to par with the rest of the quiz tools out there.

A few days ago, I blogged about starting the creation of the Question Widget base classes in CpGears. In order to properly test these classes, I took the habit of creating a widget of the same type. So, I started to work on a new version of the Multiple Choice Question (MCQ) that is a little bit more dynamic. For example, I added some mouse over effects and tweens to the question distractors. One thing that I haven’t done yet but I will soon do is to show, on the MCQ itself the wrong and right answers during the review phase. I really hate that box showing your answer and comparing with the proper answer. Why can’t Captivate just show me directly on the question?

In order to give you a sneak peek of what the widget capabilities will be, I created this small demo. The widget is far from being complete as I just started working on it this week-end and most of the features are not working. However, you can see the distractors flying into place (reload the demo if you missed it) and see the effects when you mouse over the answers. I also added the Image Zoom Widget to complement the question.

So, let me know what you think. Do you believe it’s doing to be useful and do you like it? What additional features would you expect to see on top of those demonstrated and those described in this post? Me, I would like to be able to just create the question rendering. Because it’s a widget, I will need to create an interface to record the question answers and other parameters. This already exists in Captivate. It would be great if Captivate was in charge of collecting the information and that I would just create some skin that would render the question. Maybe one day …

Funny, it seems that question widgets are this week’s topic of choice. First Tristan wrote a very nice article about how to create one and now I will ask your collaboration on the same topic. I am currently working on providing a Question Widget template in CpGears. I found out that the best way to test these templates are by creating a widget that will use it. That’s what I did with the Image Zoom Widget and the Static Widget template. So, I want to create some type of Question widget. I think there are so many things that I can do, starting with improving the current question types available in Captivate. However, I would like to hear from you on the subject. I know some suggestions have been made through the Wish List but I would like to have more ideas.

So, what type of question widget would you like to see created? Or what type of extension would you like to see added to the existing question types? I’m also curious to hear what types of question you use most when creating a quiz? I was thinking of creating a more jazzed up version of some question types. Would that be helpful? So, please feel free to express yourself!

Jim Leichliter has been an amazing contributor to the Captivate community for a while now. He’s the developer behind many great widgets such as his amazing Web Page Widget. Well, Jim has kindly offered to give some time to CpGears as a developer. He’s currently working on making many Captivate properties directly accessible from the framework. So, with Jim’s help, CpGears will probably see daylight a little bit faster.

So, thanks Jim and welcome aboard!

P.S. There are also many other developers that have proposed to be our guinea pigs to test CpGears when it comes out. This time will soon come for you guys!

As mentioned in my previous post, in order to test the static component of CpGears, I created a small widget that I call the “Image Zoom”. It’s a Captivate 5 widget that creates a thumbnail from an image and displays it full size when clicked on. This is very useful when you want to save real estate like in a quiz. I have build a small demo that showcase its capabilities.

Now, I decided to put it on sale since I did spend a little bit of time fine tuning it. The use of the widget is fairly intuitive but I must admit that I did not yet create a page for it with all the explanations on how to install it and how to configure it. So, since I’m ashamed of myself I decided to cut down the price until I write all the documentations. I was thinking of selling the widget for about $10 but I will cut the price to $5 for those who read this blog!

In order to claim the special, when buying, just use the code: MISSINGDOC

Addemdum: The page has now been created here. So sorry but the special has now ended.

Have fun!