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!

I’m still spending some time to develop CpGears and as such I decided to develop a small widget that will allow me to test its StaticWidget interface. My widget will create a thumbnail of an image and once clicked on, will display the full size image centered. Here’s an example.

When the full image is centered, I add a “mouse shield” to prevent interaction with the rest of the presentation. At some point, I was trying to debug my widget and it seemed that the mouse shield was never working. Took me a while to realize that Captivate Buttons are eavesdropping. By this, I mean that the Buttons are actually listening to events directly from the stage and check to see if it corresponds to their actual position. Side effect: No matter what you put on top of the Button, it will always respond to mouse click. It’s easy to try. Just put a button in your presentation and slap over it any image or even a caption. Run the presentation and click on the image where the button is supposed to be. Surprise! The presentation will start playing again. I must admit that this is really annoying when you want to use a mouse shield …

So, when you develop … beware of the eavesdropping buttons!