I had a customer of my Interactive Label Widget ask me how he could prevent the widget from pausing the presentation. He wanted the interactivity but didn’t want the presentation to pause. I had to explain to him that, by nature, an interactive widget expects the user to interact with it so it pauses the presentation in order to wait for the user’s interaction. That’s all dandy in theory but in practice he had other needs. The answer to this dilemma is easy, I just need to create a Static version of the widget.

However, this made me think a little bit. Creating a static widget will solve the pause problem but will come at the cost of losing the capability of displaying the Hint, Success and Failure captions. What if someone wants that as well?

I believe that there are some improvements that could be done to the widget logic. First, that automatic pausing should be optional. The user should decide if he wants or not to pause the presentation when the widget is displayed. Captivate already allows this type of behavior for the “button” control. In the Timing section of the button, you can select if the presentation will be paused or not. It should be the same for a widget.

Talking about the pause functionality, It caused me some headaches too when coupled with advanced actions. If you want to put a few widgets together and tie their behavior via advanced scripting, you might be in for a nice ride! No matter what action you decide to run when the success criteria is met, the presentation will always resume. The only way for the presentation to stay paused, is by setting the action to “No Action”. This doesn’t make sense to me, in many cases I didn’t want the presentation to resume but I still wanted to run some action! I believe that running an action should not resume the presentation unless we want it to. So, the Action section should also offer an option to resume the presentation when an action is run.

So, if I resume, I would like Captivate to offer two new options: the first one is an optional pause and the other one is an optional resume. That would make interactive widgets a lot more powerful!

What’s your thought on this? Anyone else feels this way and thinks that it should make it’s way as a feature request?

A few days ago, I was browsing the Captivate forums to see if I could give a helping hand to someone. I then stumbled on this post. The originator of the post was trying to create a widget that would extend the Likert question type. He was looking for the question header text but this information was not readily available. In order to tackle this task, he used class reflection and object introspection. This can be a very lengthy process when you don’t have the proper tools to help you out.

This need is actually quite common when you try to extend functionality of a Flash application. There’s a great tool out there that was created a few years ago and that perfectly fits that need. It is called De MonsterDebugger. It allows you to easily scan an object’s display hierarchy and to trace the object’s inner properties. You can even modify properties on the fly without recompiling the Flash application! The only part missing for us is to use it to explore presentations created from Captivate.

So, I would like to introduce you to my newest widget: the Cp X-ray Widget.  The widget, once inserted in your Captivate presentation, will enable you to discover and trace the presentation content with the assistance of De MonsterDebugger. You can find the widget (Cp5 only) on my Widget Page or download it below. You can also consult this page for a brief overview of how to use it.

Have fun!

I had the pleasant surprise to finally see my widget published on the Captivate Exchange yesterday. After my last rant on the Exchange, Micheal also created a post about the same subject. While mine got little attention, his hit the spot. Suresh, the Sr. QE manager  for the Captivate & E-learning suite, promised to update the Exchange and better yet, to make sure that widgets would never go beyond 4 weeks in the queue. So, Suresh did stand by his words and cleared the Exchange queue. Now developers will have their window for exposing their work. Thanks Suresh for making the commitment!

In the last few days, I got at least two persons asking if the Interactive Label Widget was Cp5 compatible. It wasn’t until now. I finally found some time this week-end to port the widget to the Cp5 platform. At first, I thought it would be a simple thing to do but it took me several hours after all. I had to implement the new Captivate Widget API so I could properly set the size of the window allowing the user to configure the widget. I also had to rewrite some logic that was using the slideHandle variable. The slideHandle variable used to provide a direct access to the slide containing the widget but Adobe decided to remove that capability in Cp5. Finally, I discovered that Captivate is wrapping the widget in more containers than in Cp4.

Anyway, the widget is now available for both the Cp4 and Cp5 platforms. Those who bought the widget are entitled to a free upgrade and should already have received an e-mail about this. If you bought the widget and have not received the e-mail, please contact us.

Remember a few months ago (3 to be more exact), I blogged that I published my Interactive Label Widget on the Adobe Captivate Exchange. Well, after 9 months of inactivity, Adobe finally decided to published new widgets on it. Yeah! That was what I thought so until I realized that they only published a handful of widgets and that my mine wasn’t one of them.

I suspect that they went and upgraded the exchange only to publish their own Twitter widget. They also published about 5 other widgets, most of them belonging to Micheal over at www.cpguru.com. I’m sure that they wouldn’t have published any other widgets if Michael wasn’t such an exceptional contributor to the Captivate platform.

So, at the end, I’m slowly starting to think that the Captivate Exchange is a joke. The Captivate community will grow and the tool become more powerful as developers start creating widgets. Without a window to expose their work, developers will not be interested into putting more time to create widgets. It is very sad that Adobe doesn’t see this. It doesn’t require a lot of man power to keep the site up to date and publish new widgets every 2 to 4 weeks.

Honestly, I was expecting more from the Exchange with the Cp5 release. I wrote to Adobe a few days ago and did not receive any feedback yet … not even an acknowledgment.

Please adobe, wake up and surf the Cp5 hype before it’s too late …

Just a quick post to say that I’m not dead yet and that I did not abandon my blog. It has been very hectic this last few weeks at work and I had to pile up the overtime so it left very little time to experiment with Captivate Widgets.

I’m still very busy but I will try to put some time aside for Captivate and write some blog posts.