Last year, following a request on the Captivate User forum, I created a free widget that could display a Youtube video inside Captivate. It’s a simple widget that works well but that has one major drawback: it can only play one Youtube video per Captivate project. It seems that the Youtube Player that I used doesn’t work when more than one video is loaded inside Captivate.
I always wanted to try again and find another way of doing that widget to see if I could not get around that limitation. Well, a few days/weeks ago, I was able to try again and I succeeded in loading more than one Youtube video on a slide and having different videos on multiple slides. Take a look at following example but make sure you only use the playbar buttons to control the movie otherwise you can have some issues. I know that there are a lot of things to work out but it’s a start!
Like so many people, I had the need to customize the skin for the FLV player in Captivate. I initially thought that this was going to be very simple as I just needed to change the movieclips in the Skin fla file; just like we do for a playbar. However, the FLV skin source files are nowhere to be found on the Captivate installation folder. A quick search over the web and poking a few followers on Twitter confirmed that the fla files were not provided.
Hum … that’s unfortunate but not enough to stop me. So, I decided to experiment with creating my own skin … and succeeded! It’s not very complex but there are a few things to be careful about. The skin swf file basically contains one movieclip per button state (up, over, down, disabled) and one actionscript function that tells Captivate how the player will behave and where the buttons will be located. The key is the movieclip naming convention. The assets need to have some very specific names such as play_mc, pause_mc, stop_mc, etc.
Below is my test skin where I set the skin mode option to true so it hides the buttons when they are disabled. I could have also set the mode option to false and all the buttons would have been displayed all the time.
I will take a few more days to try to come up with some tutorial on how to create the FLV skin so stay tuned for an upcoming blog post!
I realized today that I posted the first release of CpGears on Google Code about six months ago. Can’t believe that my baby is already 6 months old. I use it to develop all of my widgets and really like it.
I know that Jim at CaptivateDev.com is also using it, has always nice comments about it and even blogged about it. I couldn’t ask for a more dedicated user! However, I would really like to know if other people are finding it useful and what they think about it. Did it help you create widgets faster? What do you like and what don’t you like?
If you use or have used CpGears, I would really appreciate if you could leave a comment. And if you never used it, then what are you waiting for, download it now!
The CpXray Widget has been updated to work in conjunction with the DeMonster Debugger 3. This new version of the widget is now based on CpGears and is also working in both Captivate 5 and 5.5 (I realized lately that CpXray was not functioning under Captivate 5.5).
DeMonster 3 has some nice improvements over the last version and it seems a lot more stable and fast. So have fun debugging your widgets with CpXray and DeMonster Debugger!
While working on my Jumbled Words Widget, I came across some problems with the QuestionWidgetView in CpGears. Some methods where actually missing in order for Captivate to completely control the widget. So, version 1.2 has these new methods added (resetAnswer() and questionState) and I also took the time to add a new method on the InteractiveWidget class to reset the interaction. The method is called resetInteraction().
As usual, I hope you will have fun with CpGears and if you have any suggestion or comments about it, please let me know.
After a lot of efforts and some major headaches too, I have finally released the Jumbled Words Widget that I briefly previewed to you a few weeks ago. There are a lot of customization options available so the widget can most likely fit all your requirements.
Jumbled Words is a nice and funny game where a user has to discover a word or sentence from a pile of jumbled letters. The nice part is that the game is packaged as a widget thus enabling you to reuse it all over you courses without ever having to recompile a flash file.
If you like the widget and are among the first 5 buyers, you can get a 30% off by entering the promo code FIRSTBUYERS. If you are not among the first 5 buyers, then make sure to watch the demo until the very end and answer the questions properly
You can find more information here or experiment with the demo.
In my previous post on Captivate Interactions in the making, I mentioned that my next widget was going to be a Hangman type of game. Well, I haven’t finished my Jumbled Word widget yet but since both games are going to use the same engine, I decided to tackle them in parallel.
I think that hangman games are great interactions in a course but I didn’t want to show the typical stick figure being drawn one part at a time; I wanted something more related to the eLearning field. So I got a graphic artist to create some cool sequences for the game. Personally, I like the end results a lot but I will let you be the judge on this. I couldn’t resist showing you a preview of the Widget so here it is! I’m really looking forward hearing from you on this one. Just make sure that you at least try the game and fail at all the attempts to see the grand finale. Wait a second or two when you miss a letter before trying another one and to restart the game: reload the web page (for the moment).
For those that follow me, I think you can win the game without even missing a letter
Someone brought to my attention a small limitation of the Youtube widget. Youtube allows some special characters in its ID and I was only allowing alphanumeric characters. So, I have corrected this small issue and the Edit view should now allow entering all the legal characters of a youtube video ID. You can get the Youtube Widget for free here.
While reading the eLearning Today, I stumbled on an article that was mentioning sites that teachers can use to build puzzles/games and interactions for their courses. Sure, these are great resources but you always have to go back to the tools/web sites to create your interaction with a different content and then insert it in your Captivate course. Everybody should know by now that Captivate Widgets are great for building interactivity directly in Captivate. Unfortunately, there are not a lot of great games that can be used and customized directly in Captivate. With that in mind, I just decided to let you in on a little secret … I’m currently building some small typical games as widgets.
My first attempt is a rewrite of the Jumbled Words widget. A while ago, I rewrote the old AS2 version in AS3 so it could be used in Cp5. It’s free and still here if you are interested. However, this game is very limited and doesn’t have nice graphics. So, I rewrote it from scratch and added a lot of new features. For example, You can now use many words, you can give away some letters and you can reject the letter if it is not dropped in the proper location. On top of that, almost everything is customizable: the padding between the letters, words and lines, the size of the game and every graphic in it plus much more. My next game will be a hangman type of game.
This is a sneak peek of my engine so try to discover this catch phrase If you have ideas of features for the Jumbled Words game or if you want to give me your impressions, just let me know through the comments.
A little while ago, an eLearning developer contacted me about the Playbar Lock Widget. He had bought the widget and liked it but it was lacking a crucial functionality for him: the capability to lock the TOC. He was able to lock the TOC on the first slide and unlock it on the last slide by setting the cpLockTOC variable but once unlocked, the TOC would be locked again if the learner navigated back to the first page. So, instead of trying to figure out the required advanced actions that could solve the issue, he decided to sponsor the new feature. By sponsoring a feature, a customer takes upon himself to pay for the development of the feature but offers it as upgrade to the product. So, Richard Beale, an indepedent E-Learning developer, offers to the current and future customers of the Playbar Lock Widget, the added capability to lock the TOC. All the current customers should receive an e-mail with the reactivated download link shortly but if you are a customer and didn’t get any e-mail, you can always contact me directly.
For those of you that are in need of an E-Learning developer, here are Richard’s coordinates:
Richard Beale, Independent E-Learning Developer richard.beale “at” virgin.net
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