Introduction


I am a teacher. More specifically, I have the title of Professor, Interactive Multimedia through Humber College's School of Media Studies and Information Technologies" in Toronto. It is a fancy title, but I have never regarded myself as anything more than a simple teacher.

I am also a writer. With this, my fourth book dealing with a Macromedia technology, plus a slew of articles and tutorials for Community MX and The MX Developers Journal as well as my web site at http://www.tomontheweb.ca, I have rediscovered how much I enjoy the writer's craft and how it can be applied to my role as a teacher. Which brings me to this Captivate book.

I write about Macromedia web technologies and have discovered that sometimes it is better to demonstrate a technique rather than write about it. Although there are a number of solutions available, there always seemed to be something missing or a rather steep "learning curve."

Two years ago, when I was a judge for the EMMA Foundation awards, a company named Ehelp submitted an entry with the odd name of RoboDemo. It wasn't in my judging category, but I was given a quick run through of the product by one of my fellow judges and I couldn't help but think, "This is one seriously neat product." I then proceeded to focus my efforts on writing a couple of books dealing the Macromedia Studio MX and Studio MX 2004 products. While I was writing those books, Macromedia announced it had acquired the RoboDemo product, and in late 2004, turned it inside out and rear ranged its molecules as Captivate.

Over the course of the years 2003 and 2004, Humbert College dean William Hanna and I engaged in a conversation around distance education and eLearning. From an institutional point of view, there was very little room for a college to grow in the traditional sense. There were no parking lots that could be sacrificed for new buildings to accommodate an increased student population. We had purchased a Macromedia product called BreezeLive that creates a virtual interactive classroom. From my perspective, I felt the only piece missing was the ability to easily add screen captures and movies to BreezeLive presentations.

At the same time, a number of my New Media colleagues were starting to receive inquiries about adding demonstrations, quizzes, and so on to their Flash or HTML Internet or intranet sites. ELearning was also starting to take hold among corporate trainers and educators in both the private and public sectors, and the individuals charged with that task were looking for a solution that was easy to master, feature rich, and easy to implement.

This brings me back to my office where I am about to start writing about Captivateyet another Macromedia product. If you are a RoboDemo user, you are about to discover that the application has fundamentally changed for the better. If you are new to the product, you will discover that Captivate meets those three criteria at the end of the previous paragrapheasy to master, feature rich, and easy to implement.



Macromedia Captivate for Windows. Visual QuickStart Guide
Macromedia Captivate for Windows. Visual QuickStart Guide
ISBN: 321294173
EAN: N/A
Year: 2003
Pages: 130

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