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Control a Captivate SWF using JavaScript: The basics

Note: This post covers Captivate 2 & 3; Captivate 4 introduced new problems for JavaScript interaction. You can avoid the headache of writing your own code by using the free CaptivateController utility, which works with all versions of Captivate. JavaScript can control the playback of Captivate-generated SWFs. I posted some

Send Captivate Quiz Data to JavaScript

Adobe Captivate 3 doesn’t have a built-in mechanism for sending quiz results to JavaScript. Here’s a workaround you may find useful. The plan The basic premise of this workaround is to hijack Captivate’s ’email report’ functionality, replacing the original email-centered JavaScript with new JavaScript. This approach was

Unpublished Captivate variables

There is a newer list of variables available, which includes new Captivate 4 variables. A recent post (link no longer available) in the elearning development forum (link no longer available) reminded me that I forgot to post some unpublished Captivate variables I dug up a while back. These were gathered

LegacyCaptivateLoader: Dealing with pre-existing scripts in your Captivate SWF

Many of us use a Flash-based course interface (a.k.a. ‘player’) to load Captivate SWFs and other content. A well-known stumbling block for this kind of ‘loaded SWF’ approach has been Captivate’s lack of ActionScript support — Captivate won’t allow a user to add a simple line of

New: LegacyCaptivateLoader class

A few months ago I wrote about the dilemma of trying to load Captivate SWFs into an ActionScript 3-based parent SWF. Dilemma solved! I present to you the ActionScript 3 class LegacyCaptivateLoader. This class utilizes ExternalInterface and a proxy SWF to facilitate sending commands to and querying data from an

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