Interactive H&M Demos

Unread post by **Tim Green** » Mon Feb 06, 2006 7:41 am

The first interactive H&M demos have just been posted on the EC Software website. You can find them here:

http://www.ec-software.com/hmdemos.htm

Currently you cans see demos on:

Making links with Drag & Drop
Single source/multiple output with Help & Manual
Creating chapters, topics and multiple topics

More will follow. The next two will probably be on command line features and embedded topics. The first two demos are more a "sit and watch" style, the third is much more interactive, emulating working in Help & Manual.

Please note that despite the interactive nature these demos are really not designed as tutorials -- they are primarily for demostrating the program's capabilities to people who have not yet had any contact with it.

Enjoy.

Mon Feb 06, 2006 9:32 am

I should mention that the demos were all created by Tim.
One more reason to check them out

Excellent work, Tim!

Dean Whitlock · Mon Feb 06, 2006 5:14 pm

Tim,

Very impressive! Are these Flash? What did you use to create them?

One small suggestion: The demo opens in a new browser window. When I click Finish, the demo fades out, leaving me with a blank window (except for a small set of controls at the bottom). A "click to close window" button would be nice, or automatically closing the window, if that's possible. Otherwise, I wouldn't change a thing.

Thanks for showing them off.
Dean

Unread post by **Tim Green** » Mon Feb 06, 2006 5:53 pm

Hi Dean,

These are Flash demos made with Macromedia Captivate, which is hands-down the best application I've seen so far for creating program demos and tutorials. Even though there are scores of things I'd like to change in it it still knocks the pants off any of the other programs out there. It's quite expensive but worth every penny.

I'll look into the possibility of adding a Close button at the end.

Dean Whitlock · Mon Feb 06, 2006 6:06 pm

I've used Camtasia Studio, but only to produce AVIs to run with WMP, and not very many of them at that. Your demo was much more fluid than mine have been. It's nice to know there is a highly recommended emo tool out there. Now all I have to do is convince the powers-that-be to spend money

Thanks,
Dean

Unread post by **Tim Green** » Mon Feb 06, 2006 6:22 pm

Dean,

Macromedia has a free trial so you can try playing with it for a while before you get anyone to commit. Be warned that as in RoboHelp (same people, Macromedia actually bought the RoboHelp company to get RoboDemo, which they then morphed into Captivate -- RoboHelp didn't interest them) there are some surprisingly clunky features that drive you crazy at first.

For example, it's not possible to define the space between the text and the callout balloons of the graphical captions in the program. The callouts are defined by four BMP files and one text file that defines the margins, and you have to edit those manually. But even that doesn't change the margins in existing callouts, because the settings are only read once when you make the callout, after which they are cached. So to change the margins in existing callouts you have to copy all the callout definition files to a set with a new name and then reassign the callouts to this "new" definition...

It's little things like this that add spice to your working day...

Martin Wynne · Unread post by **Martin Wynne** » Mon Feb 06, 2006 6:41 pm

Tim Green wrote:For example, it's not possible to define the space between the text and the
callout balloons of the graphical captions in the program.

Hi Tim,

You could try Camtasia! You can copy and paste callout text straight from H&M
with all margins, paragraph spacing and formatting intact. Prepare, edit and
save all your callouts in your favourite program and just paste them across.

Martin.

Unread post by **Tim Green** » Mon Feb 06, 2006 6:52 pm

Martin,

You could try Camtasia!

I don't think so. Every program has its quirks, and the strong points of Captivate are so overwhelming that I don't want to waste time even looking at anything else at the moment - particularly after struggling for so long with TurboDemo...

Martin Wynne · Unread post by **Martin Wynne** » Mon Feb 06, 2006 7:06 pm

Tim Green wrote:particularly after struggling for so long with TurboDemo...

No argument there. It was awful - special offers from EC notwithstanding.

But I don't see anything in your demos which couldn't be done just the same
in Camtasia. Except perhaps the mouse movements. Camtasia simply records
your own activity, so if you have a shaky hand...

Does Captivate generate
smooth mouse movements between your clicks?

p.s. You used the standard small white arrow mouse cursor for the demos. It's
very easy for the user to mix up your cursor with his own if you ask him to "click
here to continue". It's helpful to change to a different cursor before recording
the demo -- there are dozens to choose from in Windows. The large black arrow
makes for a good strong contrast.

Martin.