Often, when I’m giving courses in Captivate or working as a consultant in e-learning, I run into students who have used Captivate to create their e-learning but somewhere along the way became frustrated with the standard animations and options in Captivate. They want to change the colours of an animation, create their own hotspot animation or want their quiz slides to behave differently. Because they often do not know how Captivate works ‘under the hood’, they believe that Captivate is limited. Merely a ‘pimped’ version of Powerpoint. Well it’s not.
In fact, the great thing about Captivate is that it is not only possible to dive into the program, it is in fact very easy, if you can work with Flash that is. Captivate is for a great deal based on Flash/Actionscript. The quizzes for instance are AS3 classes, while the animations are simple movieclips, you just need to decompile them and you have full access. Also you can easily create anything you want in Flash and import swf’s into Captivate. (There is however a catch to this as Captivate sometimes has a problem with Actionscript).
Althought there are a lot of people out there who are using Flash to make their Captivate do what they want it to do, still whenever I mention learning some Flash to a lot of my students, they tend to freak out a bit. I suppose that most of them have heard of Flash, have seen some really cool animations and decided for themselves that they would not be able to do that anyway.
In this and following posts I would like to give these people a taste of what you can do with some really basic Flash. These will not be tut’s on advanced Flash, or how to use Flash as a program. Just some very basic examples of how to handle Captivate with Flash.
In this part I will show you how to change the colours of an animation.
You will need the following software:
A swf decompiler: I’ve used the Sothink swf decompiler, because it’s a pretty easy one to use and it has a trial. Download trial here.
Flash: (Download a trial here)
Captivate
As you will know, Captivate has a collection of SWF Animations situated in the Captivate Gallery. You can usually find them in Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Captivate 3\Gallery\SWF Animation. I will use these animations in the following demo…
Enjoy
