All-New Adobe Captivate - Play Pause Button Tutorial

in this video I'm going to show you how to create a play pause button for the allnew Adobe [Music] Captivate I'm Paul Wilson and I make YouTube videos about Adobe Captivate once a week or so but sometimes I talk about other e-learning topics as well it depends uh today we're going to be looking at the idea of adding a play pause button I've seen some comments on the YouTube channels and the forums about people wanting to add a play pause button so that their Learners can pause the course at any moment during the playback of

their e-learning project the reasons for this are many usually it's a stakeholder realizes that they want to stop the training for whatever reason and they realize they don't have the ability of course we'll play out uh to the end of the slide and pause but they need the ability to pause it any moment so that's what they've asked for and you as an e-learning designer developer you need to provide so I'm going to show you how I do it and uh it's a simple process uh but there are some extra steps that you might not

be aware of namely that you need to consider what happens to your play pause button when you arrive on a slide at when the moment it it's been pressed but also what happens at the end of a slide as well let's take a look look okay let me just kind of explain in a high level overview of what you're going to need for this thing to work so first thing you're going to need is you're going to need an onenter advanced action for every single slide and that's to ensure that your play pause button H

is set up in the current state but also that we assign the value to a variable to keep track of what that state is we're also going to need the advanced interaction that will write for the play pause button itself and then at the end of the slide we're going to have a bookmark trigger a set of actions so that the play pause button is kind of left in the appropriate State as well I actually would normally recommend that you do this on a blank slide and then duplicate that each time you need a new

slide in your e-learning project because the advanced actions will already be in place if you duplicate it from that slide but today I'm going to attempt to build these interactions with some existing content and some audio on the slides so you can really see it in action so one of the first things to be aware of is that buttons in the allnew Adobe Captivate do not have the ability to add custom states to them you're going to have a hover State a visited state selected and a disabled State and that you can turn these on

or off as you need them but you can't add a new state and therefore what we're going to do in this case is we're going to create an image and use that as a button so it's a little bit different approach than simply adding a button block to your slide so I'm going to click on the add media blocks icon in my left-hand toolbar and I'm going to select image now the first thing I don't need is a caption and a subtitle so we're going to get rid of those with the image selected I'm going

to click on the replace image icon in my properties inspector and I already have an image of a play and a pause button on my system so I'll choose system and the the first or the default button that you choose should be the state of the button as it would appear when you arrive on the slide and for most cases the course is playing when you arrive on a slide so a play pause button should be in the pause option uh for your users to pause the slide so let's go ahead and click on open

we're going to uh edit this image because we need to make a few changes here we need the image to fit and uh while you could choose fixed height I think scaled works better for mobile and tablet so I'll go ahead and press save and we'll just resize this block to be as small as you would expect it to be with the remaining content I can select that and just choose autofit height to force that pause button to be at the bottom bottom of the slide so with the uh pause button selected let's create a

new state that will show the play button when of course the slide is paused so I'm going to click on ADD it's going to create uh a new custom state I'm going to label that paused and we will click on the replace image icon to find that other image that we need on our system and that's the play circle there click open and it will switch to that but I'm going to return back to the default State here so that looks pretty good the next thing I need to do is create the variable that I'll

be using to keep track of whether my slide is paused or whether I'm playing here so I'm going to click on the window dropdown menu and select variables I'm going to click the plus icon and we're going to call this underscore playing this is going to be a true false variable because we're either playing or we're paused one of those two states and and the default value will be true because when we arrive on our first slide this playing variable and the play pause button will be in a playing State there so we'll click on

create click outside of the variables window to close the variables window and now we can start writing our actions for this the first one I'm going to do is I'm going to create the onenter action so we'll click on interactions in the right hand toolbar here and we'll click on plus and we'll select timeline and slide enter as our trigger and the first thing we're going to do is we're going to enable this button and you'll see why in a little bit but um it's something I've added to this solution that I think works well

so let's click on more we'll choose enable and we'll select the pause Circle that you see here press next and then done the next action on enter is we need to assign our variable the appropriate value so we're going to click on more scroll down to the bottom here and select assign variable choose our underscore playing variable and we'll assign it a value of true and click done let's add a new action where we set the state of our pause button to be the default state in other words playing When we arrive on the slide

click done and last but not least we need an action that ensures that the slide is playing so we'll select add new action more and just under pause timeline is resume timeline and we'll click on done a good best practice when you have multiple actions on an interaction like this select the first item hold down your shift key select the last item and then merge these all together so that they appear to happen simultaneously so the next thing we want to take care of is what happens when we actually press our play pause button so

let's write an advanced interaction that takes care of that so let's click on the pause button here I'm going to select add an interaction and the trigger for this is a mouse Trigger or a tap or a click or whatever you want to call it there and we'll click on that and the first thing you'll notice is is that adobe Captivate has now suddenly added all the typical button states that you would see to our multi-state object our play pause button we don't need the hover so I'm going to disable that I'm also going to

disable visited selected and disabled so the only two states we'll have is our default State and the custom State we've already created called pause so let's go ahead and start to build this interaction here the first thing we need is to look at the condition of our variable that will determine which set of actions we're going to run so I'm going to click on the plus icon here and what we're basing this condition on is the condition of that variable so we'll select variable and we'll choose our playing variable and if playing is equal to

a value of true which it would be the first time time you arrive on a slide press save we want to assign our variable a value of false click done click add a new action under more we'll pause the timeline click done set the state of our play pause button to pause next and then done and like before we're going to select our first action of this interaction and our last action and we'll merge things together so that takes care of when our value is equal to true but what if we've already pressed it that

will take we'll take care of with the lse section of our condition so click on else add a new action and we're going to assign our variable of playing a value back to true so essentially we're doing the continued playback after we've paused it we'll click on add new action click under more and we'll scroll down to resume timeline cuz we are playing it again and we'll need to set the state of our button to be back to the default state which will show a pause button but look as if we're playing and click done

like before we'll select our first and our last action and merge these together so we're good with our play pause button here everything should work fine so now we need to add another interaction now the problem is if I choose slide interactions and I choose slide exit that actually is only going to run stuff when I literally leave the slide I just want to have a certain set of actions occur when I get to the end of my slide so for the end of slide actions we're actually going to trigger those with a bookmark now

we want to make sure that that bookmark is not positioned right over top of your audio so I'm going to extend the timeline of my slides I'm going to click a point on the ruler here and then click on the bookmark item to create a new bookmark you can call it whatever you like you can say end of slide or something like that but here we can click we're going to assign our variable uncore playing a value of false because we want to pause the slide at the end of the slide click done we want

to add a new action that sets the state of our button our play pause button to show us paused click next and then done we also want to add a new action that will pause the timeline done and we really don't want anyone pressing the play pause button once you get to the end of the slide and that's why we enabled it when we arrived on the slide we're actually going to create a new action that disables the button as well press next and then done so like before we'll select our first action and our

last action merge those together so the last thing I need to do is replicate all of these onenter and bookmark triggered actions to the other slide along with of course the inclusion of our play pause button block now the play pause button block is easy we can select the topmost group in the timeline there press contrl C on your keyboard and navigate to your other slides and simply paste it onto those slides works like a charm it would be great if Adobe Captivate would allow us to copy the slide enter which we can do that

is available but as far as I'm aware there's no way to paste it onto the onenter of this slide again not that I can see here so if adobe's watching this video there's something that would be nice to allow me to do these types of interactions a lot quicker in this instance I'm going to replicate those and we'll get everything up and running and so that you can see a preview of what this project will look like I'll fast forward through those parts but we'll get you set up here in just a few moments so

I've completed the on interactions that I need on the two remaining slide as well as the bookmark actions for the two remaining slides let's go back up to the top here and preview this project and make sure it works as expected now I'll test the play pause and interrupt the playback but let's take a close look at the built-in play bar to make sure that the play pause buttton matches the play pause button that's in the play bar itself so let's go ahead and Press Play Welcome to mastering public speak press the start button to

begin okay so it's now paused press start this is a stepbystep guide created to give you the fundamental knowledge and guidance you need so I can pause it at this point maybe I need to go get a coffee maybe someone's walked by my desk and wants to talk to me about something that's the real advantage of having the play pause button I mean alternatively you certainly can use the play bar but this gives you a custom solution if you want to avoid using the play bar that you see here let's go ahead and continue to

play the course you need to become a self assured and confident public speaker press the forward button to proceed okay so now it's paused again and this button is disabled pressing it again has no impact I'm forced to use the other navigation controls that either are available in the play bar that you see here or if you've added your own controls join this transformative journey to unlock your public speaking potential the play pause button works great by the end of this course you will be able to identify common fears and anxieties analyze the target audience

and their needs develop a clear and concise Central message leverage non-verbal communication skills and adapt to Dynamic speaking Styles and content press the forward button to proceed and once again it's return to a normal play button and your learners would use whatever controls you gave them to continue playing the rest of your e-learning project if you thought this video was helpful please like and share it with your colleagues if you need help with Adobe Captivate hire Paul for one-on-one instruction Paul's goal is to focus on lessons based on your specific needs visit his website at

Captivate teer.com and don't forget to subscribe to his YouTube channel