Captivate Fundamentals: An Introduction to Captivate 6

If you are an instructional designer or technical writer, you have no doubt spent time attempting to perfect the art of teaching programs using fewer and fewer words. If you are in the business of educating, you know how difficult this job can be.

These days, interactive lessons that can be viewed over the Internet or from a mobile device are all the rage. There are many programs that can be used to capture a computer's screen, mouse action and audio. Unfortunately, the resulting movies can be huge--a five minute lesson could easily gobble up nearly 100mb of storage space on a hard drive. Downloading a file that large will take a lot of time, even if a user has a fast Internet connection. Large file sizes are just part of the problem. The movies may not be cross-platform (they may not work on both Macs and PCs). Interactivity is a feature most of the "mouse capture" applications do not support. And there are few of these programs that allow images to be imported.

In short, the technology for creating interactive lessons WAS bad. But not anymore. Using Adobe Captivate 6, you can capture screen shots on your computer and quickly turn them into lessons (movies). The movies you create can be interactive--you can add images, captions, rollovers, clickable areas, typing areas and sound effects.

A practical working knowledge of Mac OS X 

Lesson 1: eLearning and Captivate

• Education Through Pictures
• Planning eLearning Projects
• The Captivate Environment
• Workspaces
• Previewing
• Blank Projects

Lesson 2: Recording Demonstrations and Simulations

• Resolution and Recording Size
• The Development Process
• Preparing to Record
• Access for Assistive Devices
• Multi-Mode Recording
• Custom Recordings

Lesson 3: Captions, Styles and Timing

• Text Captions
• Caption Styles
• Callout Types
• The Timeline

Lesson 4: Images and Drawing Objects

• Images
• The Library
• Image Editing
• Smart Shapes
• Image Slideshows

Lesson 5: Pointers, Buttons and Highlight Boxes

• Mouse Effects
• Pointer Paths and Types
• Buttons
• Highlight Boxes

Lesson 6: Rollovers and Zoom Areas

• Rollover Captions
• Rollover Images
• Zoom Areas
• Rollover Slidelets

Lesson 7: Audio

• Object Audio
• Slide Notes
• Recording Audio
• Silence
• Text-to-Speech

Lesson 8: Video, Animation and Effects

• Video
• Animation
• Text Animation
• Object Effects

Lesson 9: Converting Demonstrations Into Simulations

• Demonstrations versus Simulations
• Find and Replace
• Click Boxes
• Text Entry Boxes

Lesson 10: Working with PowerPoint

• PowerPoint as a Starting Point
• PowerPoint Collaboration
• Rescaling Projects

Lesson 11: Introduction to Question Slides

• Quiz Setup
• Creating a Quiz

Lesson 12: Publishing

• URL Actions
• Skins
• Preloaders
• Publishing
• Round Tripping

Lesson 13: More Recording Modes

• Recording Video Demos
• Recording Outside the Box
• Recording Manually