Category Archives: Captivate

New Recipe (CP7 and Video)

Captivate, Multimedia

In case you missed it, we’ve got a new (and the first) sample piece up on the Recipes page.  this example was created in Captivate 7 to demonstrate two concepts:

  1. How to do a simple ‘clickspot’ (or ‘hotspot’) overlay on video; using a ‘slide video’ on the timeline with clickspots placed at various points, pausing the video, to allow users to interact with the piece.
  2. Showing how an MP4 placed as an ‘Event video’ allows video-specific controls which will work on both desktop (SWF) and mobile (HTML5) output. Event videos in CP are the only way to show video-specific controls, but you cannot then accurately time other timeline events with those videos as they have their own controls.

Head over to the Recipes section to check it out!

Captivate: How to view the HTML5 version anywhere

Captivate, HTML5/JS

When you publish an Adobe Captivate project to both SWF and HTML5, three HTML pages are written to the output folder.

Captivate uses the project title as the filenames for the SWF-version of the published files. Say your project name is “MyProject”… In this case:

  • The SWF output will be titled ‘MyProject.swf’ and its parent HTML file will be titled ‘MyProject.htm”
  • The HTML output is called from the ‘index.html’ or ‘index_SCORM.html’ file (depending on whether or not SCORM is enabled for the project).
  • The third HTML file will be called ‘multiscreen.html’.

The multiscreen.html file involves some trickery which evaluates the browser and/or system that is accessing the project, then displays what it believes to be the appropriate version (SWF or HTML5) for the device. If you publish boimsmanifest-multiscreenth versions to a SCORM .zip package, the ‘imsmanifest.xml’ file within that package specifies the ‘multisceeen.html’ as the primary launch file; so when the user launches the lesson from the LMS, the ‘multiscreen’ file launches first, the trickery is invoked, and the proper version is presented.

If you always want the HTML5 version to  appear, you can edit that manifest file and change this line:

<resource identifier=”SCO_ID1_RES” type=”webcontent” href=”multiscreen.html” adlcp:scormtype=”sco”>

to be:

<resource identifier=”SCO_ID1_RES” type=”webcontent” href=”index_SCORM.html” adlcp:scormtype=”sco”>

However (!), be aware that not all desktop browsers work well with Captivate’s HTML5 output, so be warned this may cause issues for non-mobile users.

When I’m developing Captivate content to be delivered to both desktop and mobile devices, I rely on the manifest and multiscreen files to do their job. When testing published output, I upload the unzipped files to my staging server…and when doing quick tests, I directly load the index_SCORM.html (or just index.html) file using Chrome to do a quick evaluation of how well the mobile output will perform.

Of course, once further along, testing is done on a variety of devices for true evaluation…

So in sum, to quickly check Captivate’s HTML output on your desktop, call the ‘index’ files directly.