Intro
This is a second post about bookmarks in New and Classic Captivate. I hope you have read the introduction, where I explain the terminology and show a Captivate tutorial with examples of static and dynamic bookmarks:
New Captivate - version 12 - has only static bookmarks, but they are available on all content slides, with the exception of question and score slides. Captivate Classic has static bookmarks only on slides with slide video. However using micro-navigation (based on available system variables) you can mimick bookmarks on all slides, and also create dynamic bookmarks. Dynamic bookmarks are created on runtime and not available in New Captivate.
In this first part of bookmarking, I treat the topic from its original view: to navigate within a project on the level of frames.
New Captivate also has the possibility to use Bookmarks as events to trigger an (inter)action. That is an improvement over Captivate Classic which has only the Delay command to mimick that behavior. Again, this is limited to static bookmarks. I will publish some examples of bookmark-triggers in a second part.
Example in New Captivate
Scenario
After the title slide you’ll see:
- A list of explanations of the Steps. Appearance of each step is controlled by the user with a Continue button This slide uses bookmarks for that reason, but the original idea to use those bookmarks as navigation target from the last slide did not work. I am waiting on an answer from the team, logged a bug. Their use as event trigger has been used, but will be explained in a later blog.
- A video slide (slide video). On top you’ll find three buttons which allow to jump to bookmarks within the same slide. One of the buttons is the Replay button.
Example project
Workflow step-by-step
Bug warning
When you open a project which has a slide video slide where the video duration is longer than the default 3 seconds duration of the video placeholder, the time ruler will disappear and be replaced by an emoticon:
Luckily it is easy to solve, just move the zoom slider and the time ruler will reappear:
Step 1: Create bookmarks
If you know the exact time for the bookmark, you can move the play head near that time. For a video I recommend to use the Play button to get the exact timing. Pause/play using the space bar as toggle is still possible, but not always in a consistent way.
Click the bookmark bar to insert a bookmark which looks like a black diamond. I strongly recommend to replace the generative name by a custom one which will make it easier to find the target bookmarks. Just double-click the proposed name and edit it. In this screenshot you see a bookmark near the start of the slide, which will be used to create a Replay button:
Beware: it can happen that while editing the name that the focus switches from the Properties to the Interactions. In that panel it looks like you forgot to define an interaction for the bookmark. This is a bit confusing because it looks like 'missing'. However a bookmark used as target for micro-navigation doesn't need an interaction. The interaction panel shows all the bookmarks on a slide (bookmarks belong to the group of Slide events) with their timing.
It is possible to move a bookmark by dragging. You can delete a bookmark using the right-click menu.
Step 2: navigation buttons
On top of the video slide I added 3 buttons (it is the maximum in New Captivate within one interactive component). The button functions as trigger for the action 'Jump to bookmark xxxx'. Here is an example screenshot for Button 'Second':
The Replay button will get back to a bookmark at the start of the slide:
The Steps slide with the explanations has 5 bookmarks:
As you could read in the scenario, I meant to have 'Jump to Bookmark' as target bookmark from the video slide. But at this moment that is not working. The jump is replaced buy Go to Previous slide. I hope this will be fixed soon.
You may wonder why there is a fifth bookmark at the end? Its action is 'Go to Next Slide' to mimick the smooth transition to the next slide which was typical for all previous versions. Using the On Exit slide event is not working. I am not the only user to have found this workaround. Personallty I never have liked the PPT-like presentation playbar.
The other 4 bookmarks are using the frame event to trigger an interaction. In this first part I restrict to the bookmarks in their original meaning: as navigation targets.
Comparison New/Classic
Advantage of New Captivate: you can use bookmarks on all content slides except quiz slides.
For Classic Captivate bookmarks are limited to slides with Slide video. For other slides you need 'micro-navigation'. Next blog post will explain the workaround by replacing the same scenario. I may provide the shared actions to mimick the bookmark navigation on non-video slides.