November 30, 2004

Docs... hate 'em but need 'em.. here comes Captivate to the rescue maybe?

I'd have to say honestly that I dread doing docs for the work we do. Help docs, demo docs, tutorials aren't so bad really.. but when I hear the word docs I get this uncontrollable feeling inside to ... sleep, or go surf the net or something else other than create them.

We recently had a project to build a slightly complex component with FMX2004 and the client required documents for it. Usage, overview etc.. I didn't have the job of writing them from scratch (thank god) but I did have to translate them over to Japanese and then get them into the Flash help panel. Even though it's not really the meat of the job it's most definitely one of the most uninteresting and seems to take the longest.. not sure why.. it's all relative I guess.

Another project that we have going is a support application that runs off of FCS and it required an up-to-dating of the demos.. damn.. that's my job now.. so here goes I say. I'll finish it up all today.. (uh.. yeah.. right) - capture screen.. type some stuff, crop, put in shadow etc.. *sigh* ::start surfing engadget or something::

Lucky for me though I've got MM's new Captivate on my side and I decide to have a go at it even though I've got such a short time frame to work in. Funny thing about this.., here I was thinking that it would take me longer to get things together but in reality it took.. hmm.. I would say about 1/10th of the amount of time if I had gone to build them from scratch. I showed them around a bit and people were like "whoa dude.. you finished those in how much time??" Which is a bit of a cool feeling I guess :D

If you are curious as to how they turned out, here they are here:
View the administrator application here, and the representative application here. I'm pretty happy with them so far. Though do plan on changing up a few things to make them a bit more attractive to the eye.. template etc..

I don't have the hang of it all just yet, still learning but it's not hard and it's just a matter of practice and playing. I managed to get a bit of good advice from the Captivate product manager, Silke, which kinda made me look at things in a bit of a different light. So here's hoping that I'll continue to improve and I'll see about getting some more tutes up here with it. Not sure if I'll be as energetic as Jesse :D but let's see how it goes.

All I know now is that I didn't surf once while making those. If you haven't messed with Captivate yet, give it a shot. Suddenly making docs and e-learning material isn't so bad. (or that's what I think..)

Posted by Graeme at November 30, 2004 07:14 PM
　



Comments

Dude, your 2nd one was extremely long; did you have problems with the file save being long? Because I had narration in mind, perhaps that is what caused me to have such a long delay; did the app run slow when you were editing that big file?

Posted by: JesterXL at November 30, 2004 10:43 PM

Yeah.. a bit long. The file save wasn't bad at all really and the file editing was pretty quick. I did it all on my laptop too which is a 1.7 M p4 with a gig of ram. Not too shabby, but nothing to call home about really.

I think what really slows down the save and publishing etc. is the amount of slides. The 2nd one has less slides than you would think it has, and more highlights, captions and stuff.

By the way.. when you say extremely long, is that a bad thing?

Posted by: Graeme at November 30, 2004 10:51 PM

No no no, it's just my ... uh... over clocked AMD 3500 (no clue the speed) with a gig of RAM (which can compile every Flash control in under 3 seconds... I've tested) had a hard time saving, and editing files over 30 slides... sometimes even 19 gave it grief. I'm guessing this has to do with the audio narration files. Files without narration appear to be authored faster, so I was curious what your experience was; it appears to be the same. Have you tried with narration yet?

Posted by: JesterXL at December 1, 2004 10:33 AM

I did one a while back (wink wink), that was insanely slow to publish, save, and mess with... and that was on my desktop which is pretty high spec. That had narration and about 80 slides in it though, so I would expect it to be slow.

Not sure about only 30 slides though, and 19 is about the number of that longer one and it was smooth sailing. I wonder if it is narration... hrmm I'll give it a shot and let you know (makin' me curious here)

ps. on a completely different note, I'm almost completely cured of my sickness when playing half life. I have no clue of how you beat the game in a day though as I have only made it to the part where the girl gets abducted...

Posted by: Graeme Bull at December 1, 2004 10:41 AM

All that matters is you got the gravity gun... that thing rules.

Posted by: JesterXL at December 1, 2004 10:58 AM