Using CaptivatePlayer

I recognized the need for Captivate authors to have a simple way to play multiple Captivate SWF files and to make it easy for them to set up since there are a wide range of skill sets and backgrounds in the Captivate community. In addition to making CaptivatePlayer easy to implement for authors, it needed to be easy to access and use for the audience. Creating a new HTML page that loaded the Captivate SWF files into the HTML files, per project was unappealing; equally unappealing was having multiple EXE files grouped together in a folder. Linking to SWF files directly in a web browser does not take into account various player version checks, control over how your SWF displays in the browser, or provide your user with any sense of continuity and navigation between each SWF file. You might be able to use the Captivate MenuBuilder for creating the necessary web content, but doing this for each project could be time consuming and redundant work. Captivate is fun and easy to use for end users; I wanted an easy way to quickly deploy created content to the web.

Figure 1 shows an example of a Flash tutorial I wrote that displays in the CaptivatePlayer (highlighted in green), through the Firefox browser. As you can see, CaptivatePlayer frames the Captivate content unobtrusively, and takes up very little room.

Figure 1. CaptivatePlayer highlighted in green