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Newbie Question: Can't find / add timer widget.

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
September 4, 2022
3 replies
808 views

I need a global timer that starts counting down at the appearance of a certain slide.

The timer should be shown on several slides.

On one slide (the "home" slide), several clickable images should appear, depending on the remaining time on the timer.

But, I can't find a timer in the widget directory of my newly installed version 2019 Release (11.8.0.710).

Please help!

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Y

Yoda FundesignerAuthor

Participating Frequently

Or let's put it another way: How can I make a 75 minutes long video that has some interaction buttons at some points, which , when clicked, pop up an additional image, that can be closed again? That would do it basically.

Lilybiri

Brainiac

Use the Timeline to time the buttons. A toggle button can be created as explained in this blog:

Multiple Toggle buttons with ONE Shared Action - eLearning (adobe.com)

In short:

Create a button.

Add one custom state where you add the image.

Use the action 'Go to Next State' on that button.

Workflow also appears in this blog:

https://blog.lilybiri.com/button-states-basics-and-tips

I don't know what you mean by '75 minutes', which is awfully long. Buttons allow to pause slides, do you mean the real time spent on the course, or the developer's time which is the sum of the durations for all the slides?

Lilybiri

Brainiac

I mean the video must be 75 minutes long (full HD). Not much is happening though, just a static image and the timer counting down, plus the images appearing every few minutes. Clicking an image must make a popup image appear/disappear while the video continues playing.

Sorry, I give up. This last question is miles away from the original question. It feels like we are trying to communicate in two different languages. You rarely answer my questions probably for that reason. Hope that someone else understands better than me.

Lilybiri

Brainiac

Widgets were compatible with SWF only. Some of them have been made compatible with HTML output many versions ago, and they are named 'Learning Interactions'. Use the button Interactions to find the Learning interactions.

It can be tricky to use that interaction but there are many possibilities. Recently I posted this blog post with a use case for the Timer.

https://blog.lilybiri.com/timer-learning-interaction-use-case

The variable in the Timer interaction is just a Boolean, it will NOT store the time elapsed and for that reason is pretty useless. As I wrote in the blog, this interaction is useful when you want to show time to the learner, but not for much other use cases. I just demoed in that blog such an extra use case.

Not sure however if using that interaction will allow you to achieve your gaol! It really gives you only one possible event to trigger an action: when time has elapsed. My intuition tells me that the timing system variables may be a better choice. If you explained more details about your use case, maybe I could offer some more help.

Y

Yoda FundesignerAuthor

Participating Frequently

Thanks for the insight. Here's what I need to accomplish:

1) show a static screen, until a button is clicked.

2) show a video completely.

3) Home Screen:

- Timer starts (counts down and is shown on all following screens)

- Background sound starts (looped, continuing on all following screens)

- Different clickable images appear on this screen, depending on progress of timer (could be hidden images, or different slides that advance to next one, depending on timer progress)

- Clicking on one of the images shows another slide (different slide for each clickable image of course).

- Certain slides that are clicked need to be counted, but only once (flags for each of those slides, number of true flags would be counted and shown (a formula for total score).

4) Different slides with instructions and OK and MORE buttons. OK goes back to Home screen, MORE goes to another slide with more instructions.

5) After timer is over + some additional time, a button appears which starts the presentation from the beginning.

The whole thing should ideally run on a Mac Mini + Touch Screen, or on an iPad, as an app or in a browser, full screen.

Lilybiri

Brainiac

This is for sure not possible for a new user of Captivate, and the Timer interaction can be part of it, but certainly not realize everything. Sorry about the wrong info provided by someone else about that variable. It would be great if answers were only given after double-checking. You may have seen in that blog post that I have explored the Timer interaction (and its predecessor) in-depth. Even manipulation of the timing system variables will probably not be sufficient, you need to do some real programming with JavaScript.

Paul Wilson CTDP

Community Expert

There is a timer learning interaction in the Interactions icon on the toolbar (at least it was still in version 11.5). You can display it for the duration of a slide or have it span all your slides moving forward. It is capable of counting up or down, and you can set it for a quiz timer only. You can store the value of the timer in a variable, jump to a slide on timeout and show a message after the timeout.

Paul Wilson, CTDP

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