March 17 STC IDL SIG Tools Webinar - Notes and Answers to Questions

This post contains answers to questions that I received during my portion of the webinar, and some related notes. Some of the questions that came in apply to several of the tools that were presented so, if I missed your question, feel free to get in touch.

From KB:

Q: I will look the book up. Do you know if Adobe have a user's group for Captivate?
A: Yes – see http://forums.adobe.com/community/adobe_captivate

Q: is there a way to add a TOC into Captivate?
A: Yes, for an individual movie through the skin editor and for a group of movies through the aggregator.

Q: I found that the online captivate training is a little lacking. Can you recommend a good book to purchase to learn Captivate 4?
A: Look on Amazon for the books by Brenda Huettner and Kevin Siegel.

Q: Would like more on Captivate. Maybe another longer seminar with just Neil. A session dedicated to best practices on questions in Captivate would be a suggestion.
A: Something might be arranged thru the SIG at a later date, but that wouldn’t be for a while. In the meantime, if you’re near Philadelphia, I’m doing a half-day Captivate 4 workshop for them at their annual conference next Saturday - http://www.stcpmc.org/index.php?section=66. I’m doing the same half-day workshop again at the annual conference in Dallas, and a regular session on Captivate as well. If you can’t get to any of those sessions, email me offline and we can look at other options.

From MA:

Q: Would you quickly run through the differences between version 3 and 4?
A: The main changes, IMO, are the addition of a “review” output based on AIR that lets reviewers comment electronically, project templates as a part of the app itself, variables, customization via “advanced actions” and Flash-based “widgets”, movie tables of contents, multi-movie tables of contents created the aggregator which replaces the old MenuBuilder. Take a look at the Captivate 4 page on the Adobe site for a complete listing.

Q: I have trouble getting true video files to play within the Captivate movie once it's published & moved to a different location (intranet)--can you speak to that?
A: I’d need to know more about the types of video files you’re using – “true video” – before I could take a stab at this. Feel free to email offline if you’d like.

Q: Can you speak more about the "game" usage?
A: Basically, introducing an element of play to the learning process. Beyond that, I’d need to know a bit more about what you’re thinking of.

From LS:

Q: Can we see a question slide inserted?
A: Done. LMK if you had any questions about what I did.

From JR:

Q: Will any of these publish to Silverlight, WMV or other Microsoft formats?
A: Captivate will not. MadCap Mimic will publish to Silverlight, and I think Camtasia will also but you’d have to verify that on the TechSmith site.

Again, feel free to email offline if necessary.