Why does my captivate turn off by itself

Additionally, the final frame of a slide is often never reached because your user interacts with some object e. This would mean the On Exit action would never get executed. If you set the On Exit event to No Action , the slide will still progress to the next slide when it reaches the end of its timeline.

The most useful slide event of all is always going to be the On Enter event because it always gets fired for each slide, no matter how the slide was called. This means you could choose to play a sound, show a different feedback text box, assign a value to a user variable, or execute any number of other actions based on which answer the user selects.

What you do is entirely up to your imagination and creativity. It is only available with the Multiple Choice quiz question type and no other. But there is no way to use advanced answer options with Multi-answer checkbox quiz questions.

To get really creative with quiz questions, sometimes you just need to create them from scratch yourself. Like question slides, the Quiz Result slide also has three events, but two of them are a little difficult to find because technically they are related to the quiz itself and would occur even if the Quiz Result slide were hidden or not present.

So where are they? However, there is something important you need to know about these two quiz events. That means these events only fire after you click the Continue button on the Quiz Results slide. Or, if the Quiz Results slide is hidden, they only fire after exiting the final quiz question slide in the quiz.

In Captivate you always know when you are dealing with an interactive object because you will see options on the Properties tab to enable or disable Success and Failure captions. Listed below are the main types of interactive objects you will be using to execute advanced actions. A TEB is essentially an input field that accepts numbers or text strings entered by the user, and then stores this data in an associated user variable.

You need to turn on Validation in order to have the user input checked against one or more correct answers so as to register Success or Failure events. TEBs are very versatile and useful interactive objects, but they also have a few extra wrinkles you need to be aware of. Widgets extend the capabilities of Captivate beyond what it could do out of the box. They are classed as interactive objects because they can also evaluate to either a Success or Failure condition and thereby trigger actions.

However, exactly what constitutes success or failure is really up to the widget developer to decide. All interactive objects have at least two events that can be used to execute actions. For example, the screenshot below shows the events available for a button. This event occurs when the object evaluates to a failure condition AND the user has no more attempts remaining. Take special note of the last part of that sentence about remaining attempts, because this is an area of confusion for many Captivate authors that I explain in this other article where I discuss what Unlimited Attempts really means.

Here are some examples of failure conditions for different types of objects if the user has flunked their last allowed attempt:. Text-entry boxes are something of a special case when it comes to interactive objects. This event gets registered if the user has entered some text into the text entry field and then clicks somewhere outside the field, thereby shifting the focus elsewhere on the slide. On Focus Lost can be a very useful event when capturing user input from a number of TEBs if you need to know exactly which field the user has just interacted with, or you want to trigger advanced actions to perform more complex validation of entered data.

Captivate 6. So that pretty much rounds up all of the events you can use when creating custom interactivity in Adobe Captivate. Next comes the rather tricky question of how to decide when to use each one.

Which event you use in a given situation depends on two main factors:. Perhaps this whole event decision-making process is best explained by considering some examples of typical e-learning scenarios for which you need to create interactive solutions. This is easy enough to achieve using a click box , button , Smart Shape button or interactive widget. So, you can use the On Success event of those objects to execute a required action.

Did you mean:. Home Captivate Discussions Captivate crashes on launch. How do I fix it? Captivate crashes on launch. If you are using Adobe Captivate, and Captivate crashes or behaves unexpectedly on starting the product or even while working on a particular workflow, perform one of these: Upgrade Captivate Update Captivate to the latest version.

Double-click the file CleanPreferencesWin. Double-click the file CleanPreferencesMac. Log in and log out of current user account Log out of the current user account and then log back in using a new Administrator account.

Click the padlock icon and enter your administrator name and password. Click the plus sign near the lower-left corner of the window and choose a type of account from the New Account pop-up menu. Enter a full name for the account for example, type test. An account name is generated automatically. Enter a password that you can remember such as test in the Password and Verify fields. Enter an appropriate Password hint. Copy and paste slides to reset object IDs. Publish completely!

Clear out your project cache. Reset Captivate preferences. This folder happens to be the one that stores all of the Captivate data relevant to the options you select under Preferences and Workspaces. When that happens, the quickest solution is to either reset or delete the Preference folder, forcing Captivate to create a new default set of preferences the next time the app is launched. It would be wonderful if the Captivate preferences folder was easy to find on your computer, but it is not.

In fact, it is buried deep down inside your user profile and that means it is deliberately hidden by default so that it cannot be accidentally deleted. Do it the easy way: Use the CleanPreferences files.

Do it the hard way: Find and Delete the Preference folder. Step away from the issue! Ask someone else for advice. Give detailed info about the issue. So, if you expect someone else to help you debug an issue for, you need to give them everything you know about the issue and its context. So, if you ever log an issue on the Captivate forum, it will greatly increase your chances of finding a solution if you provide the helpful people there with the kind of basic information outlined here below.

Provide this information: Your Captivate major and minor version numbers, and whether or not all recent patches or updates have been installed. Computer operating system. Web browser version if published content is playing in browser. If content is delivered from an LMS , which one and which version.

SCORM 1. Read the user help doco! Contact us about your Captivate problems! This will give you the opportunity to review all Captivate objects and uncover the application's main tools. Then, you will use the built-in capture engine of Captivate to create an interactive software simulation and a Video Demo that can be published as an MP4 video. Then, you will approach the advanced responsive features of Captivate to create a project that can be viewed on any device.

And finally, you will immerse your learners in a o environment by creating Virtual Reality projects of Adobe Captivate. At the end of the book, you will empower your workflow and projects with the newer and most advanced features of the application, including variables, advanced actions, JavaScript, and using Captivate with other applications. If you want to produce high quality eLearning content using a wide variety of techniques, implement eLearning in your company, enable eLearning on any device, assess the effectiveness of the learning by using extensive Quizzing features, or are simply interested in eLearning, this book has you covered!

Since its introduction in , Captivate has been the leading solution for authoring interactive eLearning content. In the beginning, it was a very simple screen-capture utility called FlashCam. In , a company named eHelp acquired FlashCam and turned it into a full-fledged eLearning authoring tool called RoboDemo. In , another company called Macromedia acquired eHelp and changed the name of the product once again.

Macromedia Captivate was born. As the years passed, Adobe released Captivate 2, 3, and 4, adding tools, objects, and features along the way. One of the most significant events in the Captivate history took place in July , when Adobe released Captivate 5.

For that release, Adobe engineers rewrote the code of the application from the ground up. As a result, Captivate 5 was the first version to be available on both macOS and Windows.

Version 6 was another milestone for Captivate as it was the first version to offer an HTML5 publishing option. More recently, version 8 has introduced the ability to create Responsive Projects, as well as a brand new user interface. A Responsive Project allows you, the eLearning developer, to automatically adjust the layout of your Captivate projects to fit the various screen sizes of tablet and smartphone devices.

This makes mobile learning a whole lot easier by creating content that looks perfect on any device. At the time of writing, the latest version of Captivate is Adobe Captivate This version introduces many new features and enhancements, including the ability to create Interactive Videos and an exciting new project type for creating Virtual Reality training courses.

Other new features introduced in Captivate include the ability to test your content on an actual mobile device a feature called Live Preview on Devices the ability to record your webcam and to change the background of your video something called the Chroma Key effect as well as other smaller enhancements. With all this power only one click away, it is easy to overload your projects with lots of complex audiovisual effects and sophisticated interactions that can ultimately drive the learner away from the primary objective of every Captivate course: learning.

While working with Captivate, never forget that Captivate is an eLearning authoring tool. At the most basic level, it simply means that you, the developer, and your audience are united by a very special kind of relationship: a student-teacher relationship. Therefore, from now on—and for the rest of the book—you will not be called the developer or the programmer , but the teacher. The ones who will view your finished applications will not be the users or the visitors , but will be called the learners or the students.

You will see that this changes everything. Before you can start working with Captivate, you have to download and install the software. In this section, you will discover the three ways that Adobe makes Captivate available to you. This is the old-fashioned way of obtaining the software. You buy Captivate and get a serial number to activate your installation.

The serial number is valid for a specific version of Captivate, and for a specific platform macOS or Windows only. Once activated, that version of Captivate is permanently available on your computer. With this option, you get all the functionalities of Captivate, and you can start working on your eLearning projects right away!

You also get all the patches and bug fixes for the version you bought. All the step-by-step exercises of this book work flawlessly with the Captivate perpetual license. You can download and use this version of Captivate free of charge for 30 days. This should be more than enough time for you to go through the exercises of this book.

However, once the trial period is over, you will not have access to Captivate unless you convert your trial to a licensed version. This can be a perpetual or a subscription license. With this licensing model, you subscribe to Captivate on a monthly basis. This means that you pay a certain amount each month to keep using Captivate. The main benefit of the subscription model is that you automatically get all the updates as they are released. The subscription model is the best way to ensure that you always have access to the latest version of Captivate.

Note that the subscription is just another licensing model; the software itself is identical to the perpetual licensing model. Although the Captivate subscription model is very similar to the way Adobe Creative Cloud works, Captivate is—at the time of writing— not a part of the Creative Cloud.

It is designed to create technical content, such as help files and user guides. The Technical Communication Suite itself is also available under both the perpetual and the subscription licensing model. Creating content with Captivate is a three-step process, or to be exact, a four-step process. However, only three of the four steps take place in Captivate. That's why we like to refer to the first step as step zero!

This is the only step of the process that does not involve working with the Captivate application. Depending on the project you are planning, it can last from a few minutes to a few months.

This step is probably the most important step of the entire process. This is where you create the scenarios and the storyboards. This is where you develop the pedagogical approach that will drive the entire project. What will you teach the students? In what order will you introduce the topics? How and when will you assess the students' knowledge? These are some of the very important questions you should answer before opening Captivate.

Step zero is where the teacher's skills fully express themselves. At the most basic level, a typical Captivate project is a collection of slides, just like a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation. So, your first task when creating a new Captivate file is probably to create a bunch of slides to work with.

There are several ways to do this:. This step is the most time-consuming phase of the entire process. This is where your project slowly takes shape to become an actual interactive course module. In this step, you arrange the final sequence of actions, record narrations, add objects to the slides such as Text Captions and Buttons , arrange those objects in the Timeline, add title and ending slides, develop the advanced interactions, create the Question Slides for the quiz, configure the quiz reporting options, and so on.

At the end of this step, the project should be ready for publication. Sometimes, it can take several rounds of edits until you have a project that is ready to publish. Note that, for most projects, step one and step two overlap. Unless you use screen capture, there is no clear distinction between step one and step two.

It is ok to go back and forth between those two steps when developing your next Captivate project. Step three is where you make your project available to your learners. Captivate allows you to publish your course modules in a wide variety of formats. It is very important to know the publishing format you will use before starting the development of a new project.

Captivate can also publish the project as a standalone application. Step three will be covered in great detail in Chapter 15 , Finishing Touches and Publishing.

In this book, we will cover the three steps of the process requiring the use of Captivate. You will discover that Captivate has specific tools to handle each of these three steps. The default Captivate screen looks very simple and clean. The main area is covered by the Stage 1. The Stage is where you lay out the objects that make up each slide of the project. The objects on the Stage will appear in your course.

The objects in the Scrap Area the grey area around the slide will not be visible when taking the course. This makes the Scrap Area very useful!