Well it has been a great week here at the Exchange after a month hiatus in Eindhoven, Netherlands.

Most of my week has been spent fine tuning the details of the Vacufuge safety video in Captivate 8.  Yep! You heard right! We have switched from Captivate 7 to Captivate 8.  And to boot I have transitioned from using a PC to a Mac.  All of this has culminated in quite the learning curve on how to navigate and to manipulate items in Captivate. And without a proper instructional video on how to use new items like the Drag and Drop interaction on a Mac, most of my time has been spent on poking around, using trial and error to find out why my interaction was not responding in the same ways as the PC version. However, after several hours and sheer persistence, I am happy to say we have it working the way we wanted it to!!

Learning to customize Drag and Drop Interactions in Captivate 8 on a Mac
Learning to customize Drag and Drop Interactions in Captivate 8 on a Mac

Key take aways from the experience include:

  • Captivate 8 tool windows are hidden until manually turned on for a Mac.
  • In order to only have one correct answer for a Drag and Drop Interaction, you have to click on the Drop Location, click on the Format tab, click on the Object Actions… button, and then select the appropriate Drag Source Type on a Mac — not intuitive or parallel to a PC.
  •  When you preview the file th Drag items disappear once you match them to the Drop Location so you first have to publish it to HTML5 (SWF does not work).
  • You can create your own success captions, but only by creating them in Photoshop and saving them as a BMP file under the Captions Gallery in the Captivate Program folder.

Thank you Ram, Ryan and Ameer for your help and support — I really appreciated it.

Still, the final draft is looking quite SHARP and I cannot wait to share it with Debbie (our client)!

Although not directly related to the work we do here at the Exchange, I truly think this light display during Glow Week in Eindhoven is a prime example of innovation and collaboration.

Roxanne