Captivate blog

If you did read some of my posts, you'll know that I focus often on using Advanced actions in Captivate to extend its functionalities. And if you look at the just released version 6, like me, at first sight you will be disappointed because apparently nothing much has changed about Advanced actions: no enhancements in the user interface, only two possible new statements (play and stop an audio clip), still not possible to export/import/print/comment those advanced actions, etc. To re-use them you'll have to create a template, and here is a first positive note: it is now possible to save an existing cptx-file as a template.

Same as with the release of Captivate 5.5 I'll leave it to the Evangelists and other Captivate friends to talk about the big new features like new video demo, interactions, shapes, quiz enhancements, themes, shapes etc. Those more visible features, even though they are exciting, have never been targeted by this blog and I'm a focussed person. Hoping to find time to publish more in the near future, planning to use the new video feature to publish some YouTube videos about.... advanced actions. Let me know if you find that useful?

On this release day, I want to tell you how two new features (my first favs) will save you a lot of time when scripting advanced actions:

• object grouping
• shapes used as buttons

For this purpose I recreated in CP6 a Game, explained in a previous post: Concentration Game. Can you have a look there and play the game if you do not remember about it? The CP6 version is a bit simplified, has less cards and only one image to discover. But the differences due to those new features will be very clear.

In the original game, each part of the image was covered up with three objects:

In Captivate 6 I replaced the objects 2 and 3 by one Shape button. Contrary to other interactive objects, a shape button can be set for the rest of the project, to preserve its unique ID. Since now only two instead of three objects have to be addressed, advanced actions will be shorter.

Long awaited feature: being able to group objects on the Timeline, to label the groups, to collapse/expand them, to make them visible/invisible on the stage for editing reasons. Less known: you can use the group label in advanced actions as well, to execute a statement on all the objects of the group. That is great for show/hide or for enable/disable actions. In the new game I choose to create a group with all the Mnenomics, and another group with the Shape buttons. When entering the last slide (Congratulations) all those objects have to be hidden. In Captivate 5.5 this resulted in a long list with Hide statements, 3 for each card (since I had three objects per card). In Captivate 6 you only need two statements: one for each group, whatever the number of objects in that group. That is really a great time saver.