Cptiavte 8 - the actions does not appear in proprerties when adding a word search widget - any clues please

Question

Are  there some bugs in captivate - the properties do not always show timings - is this the same for Actions on a word search widget?

Answer 1

I understood perfectly your question. There is barely documentation about the learning interactions. I have been presenting last year at DevLearn about them with great success, but this year that presentation (even a workshop would be useful) was declined. And I never see any tutorial about them, no documentation in the Help etc.  Wondering why, because they offer some time saving functionality to make a course more engaging. In my last blog post I showed how the Scrolling TextArea Interaction (as widget it is called TextArea, name that is still visible for the interaction as well???) can be used for a Short Answer question with more functionality than the default one: Custom Short Answer Question - Captivate blog
There is already the big confusion: why are there Widgets (they still are included) and Learning Interactions that both are pointing to widgets (hence the generic name), just to make the difference between those widgets that are SWF only and those that are compatible also with HTML5 output (the so-called Learning Interactions or Interactions)? Terminology is to say it very diplomatic, bit 'inconsistent'.
But what I explained in this blog post about Widgets, the 3 categories, is also valid for the Learning Interactions: http://blog.lilybiri.com/using-captivate-widgets-some-tips
You will see that static widgets cannot trigger Actions! Only the interactive widgets (and question) can do that. It is the same difference that exists for objects: non-interactive objects like text captions, images, cannot have actions attached to them, only the interactive objects (buttons, click boxes, TEB's, shape buttons). There is one hybrid object, the rollover slidelet. The Interaction you are pointing at, Word Search, is a static interaction, which means no actions and thus the Actions tab will not appear!
Another blog post shows all the events that can trigger an action: Events and (advanced) Actions - Captivate blog
As for your second question: in Captivate 6 all interactions were pausing at the first frame, and that caused a lot of problems (audio not playing is one of them). For that reason the behavior changed radically from 7  on: now they are not pausing at all. That means thaty you need to insert an interactive object with a pausing point like a button (think about a Next button?), click box, shape button...
Oh yes, static widgets cannot have score attached to them, there is no real way to check if the WordSearch widget has been used? It is an exception, because the other game interactions have an associated variable, are interactive, can trigger actions and can have a score (but that is another long story).
Think I have spent already too much time answering, to try to fill in the gaps in the documentation. I could write multiple articles on Interactions, want to provide more information but free things are not considered valuable at all. Why should I bother