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:

Thanks Richard for your contribution!