It seems that CpGears users have the wrong impression that CpGears doesn’t handle native Captivate events such as CPSlideEnterEvent and CPMovieStartEvent. Actually, CpGears offers a way for monitoring all native Captivate events and I decided to create a small article on the CpGears site to demonstrate how. I have also included a sample project that monitors the changing of slides as well as when the presentation is playing or paused.

Since all widgets containing code that monitors such events need to be compiled, I took the liberty of compiling all native Captivate events in a single captivate.swc file. This way, you can add it to your FlashDevelop project and not worry about where the event classes are located on you PC. You can find the SWC file in the downloads section of the CpGears site or just by clicking here.

By the way, I would like to hear from those that tried CpGears and have them give me their impressions …

At the last Adobe Learning Summit, I attended Josh Cavalier’s presentation on Captivate for mobile. It was a very good and entertaining presentation. Josh presented examples of Captivate courses built for his mobile. It was clear that the standard playbar and controls were not meant for the mobile world and Josh said quite a few times that you would need to build a widget for doing this or that. At some point, the subject of gesture recognition was brought forth and many wished that Captivate would include this in a future release. Well, that was enough to trigger my interest and I looked around to find a free/open source gesture API. Of course the Flash Player 10.1 has some but I wanted to find something quick and easy. I found such an API from ByteArray.org. It’s a very easy and nice API, just enough for experimenting.

So, I used this API to create a widget that would recognize the standard gestures to switch page. It’s not bullet proof but here’s my first draft at it. You can change the page by dragging your mouse/finger to the left or to the right.

If you want the widget, you can get it HERE.

I just finished giving my widget presentation at the Adobe Learning Summit 2011. I said that I would make my presentation available on my site so here it is: Adobe Captivate Widget 101.

No one can be indifferent to what’s currently happening in Japan. In those hard times, a small gesture can make a difference. So, I decided to give some money to the Canadian Red Cross relieve fund for Japan. On top of my personal contribution, I decided to give this week’s proceeds from my widget sales to the fund as well. Widget sales are not something that is constant. Some weeks you get some sales and some weeks you don’t get any. However, this week has started really well in term of sales and it will be a pleasure to give it all to the fund. However, why stop there? Let’s do it for next week as well!

Therefore, if you had any intention to buy a widget from Flash-Factor, please do it this week or next week so that the money can go to a very good cause. I’ll go even a step further, if you want to give some money to any Japan Relief fund in the next two weeks, just send me a proof of your contribution and I will give you the widgets that you want up to the level of your contribution. If you give $50 or more, I will give you all three widgets (Interactive Label, Image Zoom and CpNotepad).

So, please be generous between March 13th and March 26th!

Yves

As I’m sitting down at the airport waiting to board my flight for my vacation (in the middle of a snow storm), I’m looking at the tweets and blogs about Captivate. Lieve (aka Lilybiri) just wrote a post about her frustration with the lack of control over scoring slides. Lieve is definitely one of the most active contributor in the Captivate community and she’s an expert at Advanced Actions. You would think that where Advanced Actions are not enough, a widget will do the trick. Well, it’s not always the case.

So, I will add my voice to Lieve’s and share my little frustration as well. I really like Captivate and I think it’s a great tool. However, there are times where I have to resort to weird hacks to get things working, just like Lieve has to. I’m sure that, like any tool, the Captivate widget API will evolve and get much better over the next few years but it sure would be nice to have Captivate offer more control over the runtime presentation sooner than later. And also more control over the Quiz API. Right now, you have to resort to using the external Javascript API to communicate with the LMS. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could do that directly from our Widget API? What about being able to offer partial scoring for our Widgets?

I’m sure that the Captivate gods will hear our prayers and bring us some surprises for the upcoming Cp6

In the mean time, if you are interested to learn some tips and trick about widgets, just make you way to the Adobe Learning Summit 2011. I will be presenting what I know about widgets.

Just wrote a new article on another very powerful feature of CpGears: the eventing mechanism. In CpGears, you can know when a widget has changed its visibility. Even more powerful is to know when a Captivate Variable has changed its value. Check it out on google code!

And if you attend my presentation on widgets at the ALS 2011, just make sure to let me know if you like CpGears or not!