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n.moked
Known Participant
November 20, 2016
Question

A tip for getting a consistent user interface without working very hard

  • November 20, 2016
  • 1 reply
  • 265 views

When building our courses with Captivate software it is important to provide our students with a pleasant user interface. Screen objects should consistently appear at the same locations and have the same size in all slides where they appear, unless we decide otherwise. Especially in a responsive project, with its multiple breakpoints, and in multi-lesson courses this can make for a lot of work. I found a solution for that.

I decided to purchase a macro recorder. That is a software program that makes a recording of our mouse movements and our key presses. After that it can play back the recordings, at the same speed or at a higher speed. After checking various programs I decided to purchase Auto Macro Recorder (http://www.macro-recorder.com) for $29,95.

I use it in the Object Position section of Captivate. Now text captions, buttons and other screen objects are always at the exact same positions and have the exact same size - it's like a robot doing the work for me. When playing back is finished the program (optionally) announces: Playback completed! so that I know when to return my attention to Captivate.

The result is that the technical side of developing a course now goes much faster. Highly recommended!

This topic has been closed for replies.

1 reply

eLearning Guy
eLearning Guy
Inspiring
November 23, 2016

Unless I'm misreading your post - I have a free alternative:

Setup one slide the way you want it with all buttons, then copy all of the navigation elements, then select all of the slides in the project that you want them to appear in and hit CTRL-V to paste them in : )

Or use master slides, if you don't need state changes.

N
n.mokedAuthor
Known Participant
November 24, 2016

Hello tireduser,

I certainly agree with you that your method is great for a new project. I think my method works better when improving an existing project.

Two remarks regarding the method you suggest:

  • In the slide where all screen objects are defined you can set Display for (in the Timing section) to Rest of project, and on each consecutive slide hide superfluous objects using an Advanced Action.
  • If you want to align an existing screen object to one defined in the slide you mentioned, and resize it to the same size, you can
    • copy it to the current slide
    • first click the copied object, then the existing object
    • click the "Align and resize to the same size" icon in the Align toolbar
    • remove the copied screen object in the Timeline. The remaining object will now have the same size and position as the one you defined in the special slide..
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