The de facto tool of choice for trainers is PowerPoint. While I was exploring new ways to present my training, I discovered Adobe has a product for trainers. The product was formerly a flagship product from Macromedia, the creator of the ubiquitous web designing tools; Flash and Dreamweaver. After Adobe acquired Macromedia in 2005, Adobe has continued to improve Captivate to make the tool even more friendly and added more features for trainers to prepare their materials. I was glad that history did not repeat itself that products after being taken over often died a slow death when the new owner did not know what to do with the product. I wondered how many remembered when IBM took over the then de facto word processor; WordPerfect. Similarly when UnderWare sold one of the most popular programmer's text editors "Brief" to Borland, Brief died a similar death. It therefore gave me a tickle of happiness that a product (in this case Captivate) can continue to grow and live its purpose. For that, "good on yer, Adobe", for doing a wonderful job to continue to grow and add useful features to Captivate.
Multiscreen
One of Captivate's features that attracted my attention is her ability to create multiscreen training materials in a WYSIWYG way without any coding. In this modern era, where users are no longer restricted to sitting behind the desk and using their PCs, users are demanding to have access to contents from their smartphones, from their tablets and of course from their laptops; access to the same content anywhere and anytime. Multiscreen enabled the content author (e.g. trainer) to create a single content and present the same content to users via their devices of choices (laptops, smartphones, tablets and in other cases, TVs). Captivate provides a very simple way to create multi-screen contents. Markers on the captivate editor (also known as breakpoints) set the 3 standard views; each view serves the layout for the dimensions for the targeted device
- Primary view for laptops (1024 x 627)
- Tablet view for tablets (768 x 627)
- Mobile view for smartphones (360 x 415)
Adobe believes that these 3 standard layouts are sufficient to get target most of your audience out there. You can change these layout sizes (heights or width) but you are restricted in the total layouts available to you; you cannot add more breakpoints.
Adobe coined the term "responsive" design to describe how Captivate allows content authors to design a single training content that will be rendered correctly to their users. My way of interpreting this jargon is that contents will be auto responsive to the devices the users used to view the contents; i.e the contents will be rendered correctly on the appropriate device. Adobe further makes it easier for the authors to pretest how their content will look on laptops, tablets and smartphones via the multi-device preview feature. You can also use the free Adobe Edge app to preview your content on a physical mobile device. Responsive design is only available in Captivate version 8.
Parent-Child-Grandchild inheritance
The Adobe engineers adopted an inheritance design pattern to make the content author easy to create content for 3 different views. The design pattern adopts a parent-child-grandchild concept. The primary view is the parent. Whenever you change the objects in the primary view, the content in the child view and grandchild view will be automatically modified. Similarly whenever you change the objects in the tablet view (the child), the grandchild view will be automatically modified. However, when you do this operation on the child, the parent-child relationship will be broken; i.e. the objects in the parent view will not be changed. The ability to break the parent-child-grandchild relationship is a very useful feature to authors.
There is another technique to have a different look and feel between the views. You can either use the "Exclude from Other views" or you can pull the object to the outside the viewpoint from any view. Internally, using the first option will pull the object to the outside the viewpoint from the other views. There is however, a subtle difference in the output. To have an object in a specific view (either in the Parent, the Child or the Grandchild), use the first option on the specific view (see purple rectangle below). To have an object in both the Parent, Child view, use the second option on the Grandchild view (see white rectangle below). To have an object in the Child and Grandchild view (see green rectangle), it is a two step process. First, you must Exclude the object from other views on the Parent view followed by pulling the object back from the outside in the Child view.
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| Blue rectangle is rendered in all views Purple rectangle is shown only in the Parent view. White rectangle is rendered in both Parent and Child views Note: the Green rectangle is outside the viewpoint of the Parent view |
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| Blue rectangle is rendered in all views White rectangle is rendered in both Parent and Child views Green rectangle is rendered in Child and Grandchild views |
Smart positioning - How smart can you be?
One of the features that Captivate provides to authors to design your object layouts is smart positioning. Smart positioning allows you to anchor your object relative to the slide boundary. This feature reminds me of a similar functionality by Microsoft XAML editor in Microsoft C#. Compared to Microsoft C# editor, Captivate provides more options to position your objects.
By default, any object created is anchored to the top and left boundary of your slide. Positioning is made even easier by visually dragging the smart-positioning anchor to the other boundary. Please note that the a position marker can only be re-positioned in the same direction. The top boundary marker can only be re-positioned vertically to the bottom while the right boundary marker can only be re-positioned horizontally to the left boundary marker.
Bug Alert: There is a bug in v8.0.0.145 when you duplicate your object. The "Object Size" may be different in your grandchild view or the text changed in your primary view is not changed in your grandchild view.
For positioning, I recommend you to set your position value using the % instead of using the pixel. The layout renders correctly in the different views when you select to use the % unit. If you opt for the latter option (pixel), you must set the positions separately in all the views. Besides the % and px, you can also use the "% Relative" if you have the need to position an object relative to another object.
Last but not least, you have at your disposal, the min-max feature of Captivate. This allows to fix your object size so that the auto-scaling feature will not distort the shape of your objects. This is illustrated by the diagram below. The objects (white rectangle and the adobe logo) on the bottom is fixed to a minimum size while the top objects (purple rectangle and the adobe logo) scaled accordingly when they are rendered on the grandchild view.
"Layout of multiple objects" made easy
Modifying the layout of multiple objects is made very simple with Captivate. Once you have selected two or more objects, you can
The first selected object is used as the reference for your modification. Example, if you align two or more objects to the left by selecting object_1, object_2 and object_3, all the objects will be aligned left to your first selected object (object_1).
- align your selected objects to the top, left, bottom or right,
- size them equally
- space them horizontally or vertically
What's Next
As my main aim is to create assessment questions during my training session, I would discuss my exploration on the Quiz capability of Captivate. This feature in combination of the navigation capability of the slides will be explored in my next segment.
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