Campus Tours sites of the day - how do they use Captivate?

Question

Hello,
I'm new to Captivate and am still figuring out which situations it might be easier to use it rather than building something in Flash. I can see that quizzes, screen-casts and scenarios are obvious places. But I've also been looking at the first two 'Site of the Day' examples in the Adobe Captivate showcase (the campus tours of AI Philadelphia and Berklee College of Music) and I can't see how they would have used Captivate to produce them.
The examples are both very nice promotional presentations about universities and they look great - nice internal popups with videos, images etc. I understand that you could build widgets to provide these kind of features but I don't understand what the benefit would then be of importing these in to Captivate rather than just building it in Flash.  Am I missing something obvious?  Do people use Captivate for storyboarding and then move into Flash?
Any advise would be appreciated. I do love Captivate so far but am not sure how to put it to use most effectively.

Answer 1

It depends how fancy you want to get.
The easiest way to achieve this is to do as you currently have, but set the On Exit action for the final slide in each group to jump back to the Menu slide.
In order to give the user the option of continuing on to the next slide, you can place a button on the final slide of each group and set it's action to jump to the first slide of the next group.  You need to set up some variables and Advanced Actions to show/hide this button depending on whether or not the user has clicked the button on the menu to view all slides.  If they've just clicked the button for a particular group, the Continue button remains hidden and they'll be jumped back to the menu.  The disadvantage of this method is that it requires the user to click something at the end of each group to continue to the next.
If you want the user make their choice on the menu slide to play all sections one after the other, and then to be seamlessly taken to each new group without clicking anything, then you need to get slightly fancier with your Variables and Advanced Actions.  Basically, On Exit of the final slide in each group, instead of the action to jump back to the menu, you need to have it perform a check to see what the value of the variable is that determines whether to continue or not.  If the variable is 1 (to indicate continuous play), then it will jump to the beginning slide of the next group.  If the variable is 0, then it should jump back to the menu.
If you're unfamiliar with Captivate Advanced Actions and user variables, this is your opportunity to learn!