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.

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!

One of the problems that widget developers are facing is to decide what will be their next widget. Sometimes you will see an idea or a need come up on the Captivate Forums. A developer might decide to take on the task and create the widget. He will then either give it back to the community for free and charge a small fee for it. I just saw such a need a few days ago for a Youtube widget that would work in Cp5 and decided to give a kick at the can.

Tristan at www.infosemantics.com.au started a while ago a nice initiative to complement the Adobe Exchange. He created The widget Treasury that displays the different widgets created by developers just like me. However, this made me think that there are no real places where the community could post their suggestions for widgets and vote for it.

As such, I decided to give this a try. I created a page on my blog and installed a small plug-in to keep track of the votes. So, if you would like to voice your ideas about widgets, access the Wish List page and add a comment describing the widget you would like to see created. However, read the other suggestions first to see if another reader has already proposed the same widget. If the widget was proposed, then simply vote for it! The more votes a widget will have, the more chances you have that a developer will step up to the challenge!

So, go to the Wish List page and vote now!

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.