Interactive drag and drop (right clicks)

quote:

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Originally posted by: Captiv8r
Hi katymeredith

I'm sorry to hear you don't view Captivate useful. However, your post confuses me just a bit.

What is the intent? If you want to just rant, I guess that's fine. But we are all users here just trying to help one another out. If you feel Adobe might be reading and making decisions based on user posts, you would be wrong. They seldom look in here, leaving it pretty much to us. This isn't a slam against them or even a bad thing. Just the nature of peer-to-peer support.

I would like to address some of your assertions though.

You said:
The lack of proper right click functionality really makes Captivate a non starter for serious application training simulations.
Fair enough. Yes, I agree right mouse click is an issue. But there are workarounds. Perhaps if the developers hear enough folks ask about it, it will change.

As does the lack of mouseover transitions.
I'm not sure what you mean. Captivate does have mouseover effects. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding what you mean by "mouseover transition". Just last night I posted an example to my site in order to ask another user if this is what was meant. Take a look at it and see if you disagree that this constitutes a "mouseover transition". Click here to see example

As does the lack of proper keypress transitions.
Not sure what you mean with that.

As does the lack of proper text entry handling.
Or that either. I use Text Entry boxes all the time with no issues. Maybe I'm doing it wrong.

As does the fact that you can't properly pause a slide (keep your browser minimised for long enough, and you'll complete the course without having to do anything!)
Hmmm, I've never seen a movie that has been paused by an interactive object just take off on its own again and simply complete with no intervention. Are you talking about a demonstration and not a simulation?

Cheers... Rick

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Hi Rick

I DO find Captivate useful - just really frustrating when it comes to developing interactive tutorial simulations. And what I find most frustrating is that it's a really really good product - but that doesn't quite do what I need it to do

Hence the rant .....

And what I meant was:

1. Right click - probably the biggest gripe. Yes, I know that there are a few workarounds, but they all seem to require you to start coding, or work in some situations and not others; if I'm releasing a sim to 10000 people with varying setups I need to be absolutely certain that it'll work.

How many applications do you know that don't use right click? So Captivate must have full right click interactions (and by that I mean - anything you can do with the left button you can do with the right button).

2. Mouseover stuff. That example of yours looks pretty impressive - not quite what I had in mind though - I really mean transitions on mouseover to next slide, back to start of slide, to slide x, etc etc. - example: to activate a submenu by hovering over it, or to correctly show the change in a button's appearance when you move your mouse over it.

I know you can do this with a rollover image - at least, you could if it didn't crash my PC when I tried to open the image - but that's so time consuming to have to manually grab and overlay an image for every mouseover. So again, I really need an 'anything you can do with a click you can do with a hover' interaction.

3. Proper keypress interactions. I need to be able to detect a keypress, regardless of where the mouse pointer is or where the focus is. I know there's a partial solution involving text entry boxes and jiggling with the shortcut key, but there are pitfalls if the focus isn't in the text box. What I really need is an interaction that covers the entire slide and simply detects a keypress and gives me the same navigation options as a click.

4. Text entry handling. Yes, there's the text box interaction, if you don't mind it not really looking like your actual application - but where's the pre entry text? Most apps will squirt some default (preselected and editable) text into text boxes - as far as I know Captivate won't - unless you klutz it using an image - which you then can't edit.

And when you do edit the text in the box, the highlight colours don't match system settings. And you can't get the text to wrap properly according to the size of the text box - it sort of scrolls horizontally. And the multiple correct answers is good, but it won't give any leeway to spelling errors - other other sim builders will allow you to allow, say, 6 out of 8 characters as being enough to count as 'correct'. Oh, and there should be an option for Captivate to monitor typing and immediately spot the correct entry's been typed without waiting for an exit key or click.

5. I might be about to admit I was wrong here .... - my understanding was that you couldn't keep a slide active for more than 3600 (?) seconds in a simulation, and that if the slide reached its maximum time it automatically went to the next one? Have to admit I haven't really experimented with that side of things.

So are you saying that if you have a clickbox interaction that moves to the next slide, and the user doesn't click it, and you don't have a playbar, then the slide will just stay there. For ever? If so, that does make Captivate a bit more useful to me! Apologies if I've got the wrong end of the stick on that one.

I know all this may sound like minor niggles, but it's very important to me that my sims look and behave as close as possible to the original app as possible. I'm more relaxed about demos - which is where I'm using Cap at the moment. In comparison to the sim builders you get with LMS systems it looks fantastic and is miles more intuitive - it's just that they tend to have all the interactions I really need - and Cap doesn't.

If they can get what I've mentioned above into Cap 3 - or, hope against hope, 2.1 - I'll be abandoning traditional sim builders.