Digital Workshop

Hi everyone
As I wrote in an earlier thread I am demoing Opus Creator, interesting, affordable and powerful, a real blessing when you have the ideas but are overwhelmed by some of the other suites.

My aim is to produce small narrated stories for my (foreign language adult) students to read and listen on screen.

I am trying to make a working prototype, a template that I intend to reuse if the result is succesful.
(Please see attached pic)

The template I envision has:

- a text display area where the sentences
appear one by one

- each sentence has an mp3 with the text spoken.

- an eye icon (for listening purposes) to toggle text visibility, a click on the eye makes text invisible. Click again and the text is visible again.

- pause button for viewer to start and stop the text/sound narration

- navigation for viewer to move back and forward in the story (review / repeat individual sentences)

Questions:

1) how do I get the individual text items (sentences) to show up one by one?
Shall I put each sentence on a page? Hence: Page 1: sentence 1, page 2: sentence 2 (or sentence 1 + sentence 2), page 3: sentence 3 and so on?
Shall the text be in frames?

2) How do I get a button to show/hide all text items?

3) How do I program a line so that click and drag on it affects navigation (sentence 1, 2, 3 AND sound)?

4) what do you think about the controls and navigation I am considering? Do you have suggestions? Other ideas?

5) where do I find inspiration about the page design (colors, shapes, graphics)?
I'd like to get a nice and pleasing result. My starting point is: white background and not so many bells and whistles.

- if any of you has teaching experience I'd like some input as well about the best way to include following:

a) images and/or illustrations to enrich the experience and provide visual gratification
I was considering to let images appear shortly alongside the text.

b) images to to clarify some of the new words the student may encounter

c) word definitions/explanations. Some words aren't easily explained by images, maybe make a separate section of the presentation for this purpose? For example a definition of the italian 'trattoria' would be: 'informal, affordable restaurant'. Or make these words bold and put an hidden tooltip text that shows up if student hovers the word?

Thank you a lot in advance

No one?

After reading the guides I understand that getting all text items to disappear at once is piece of cake.
BUT....if the same 'EYE' button has to show/hide on the same action (say left mouse click), how is that accomplished?

Opus has loads of different ways of doing most of things you want to accomplish. Here's just two points that might be useful.


1. If you want two or more things to happen at once - just add the actions to the same trigger. IE add a mouse click trigger then add a hide (for text) and then add a hide (for eye) - with both actions on the click trigger.

Note: Opus will normally do one after another but if they are simple actions - the difference shouldn't matter. However, you can have more control using the simultaneous and consecutive actions on the program tab.


2. If you have a lot of timings to control - learn how to use the time-line object (vertical middle tool-bar - 4th from bottom). It allows you to drag and drop actions onto the time-line for easy control.

Mack

Thank you a lot for your answer!

I think my reply was misleading: I want the eye to stay visible, a click on it should show or hide text: hence one button two functions.

Again loads of ways to achieve this sort of thing but probably worth dipping into some programming logic. On the programming tab is the if / else actions. Use this with a variable to check the state and show / hide the eye accordingly.

Have a play / read of the help for this actions and if you're still stuck, I'm sure somebody will post an example...

...but you need to click on 'user control panel' - top right - and update your with some information like Opus version as people generally avoid helping anybody who doesn't have some basic details.


Mack

Thank you a lot!

Please, everyone else, feel free to chime in about the other questions.

Billybob,

You might consider going to DW's site and looking at some of the Examples and/or Tutorials (which may require you to download a demo version of more current Opus sftw).

If fact, your question in this thread is quite open-ended -- kind of "what is possible", "what is good to do...". That's fine. But realize this... you have no Profile information about your Opus (or Creator) version and your development system/OS. So it is likely that helpful people, not knowing you are limited to an old old version of Opus, will suggest actions that depend on using features and effects only available in Opus 6.x and later. For example, why not use a 'tween' to show User a successfully completed step or answer? Or, any of many other Transition effects built-into modern Opus.

You could email DW Sales and ask what they would offer for an upgrade path for you, and they can advise if your current hardware/OS is adequate.

You have quite an interesting project ahead of you. IMO if you are serious about it, try to upgrade your tools and you will go much further than you imagined.

Thanks for the input and please keep them coming.

BTW: I just upgraded to the latest Opus Pro (I had an old version of it, so I luuuved the upgrade path).
I have been trying to produce something useable with the Opus Creator demo.

My system is: i7 laptop with Windows 7

I hope you can give me some hints about what I am trying to accomplish. Very exciting!

You should update your profile w/ Opus and system info -- so it appears in any future posts.
As for 'hints', well that is tough to 'answer' -- one answer is just to play with simple constructs and try different things. Explore.

As Mackavi said, there are so many ways to accomplish a thing.
One of the factors in play here is 'how much material' you will have and 'how will you want to maintain and update it'. For example, an easy approach is to have several sentences (10, 20, more?) on an Opus Page and revealed as User progresses. Then more on another Page and so on. However, as the publication gets 'large', maintenance of the content can become cumbersome.

Then if you turn to entering and maintaining your sentences in external files or a database, you might gain an advantage of ease in maintenance but you increase the difficulty and complexity of coordinating that with other presentation elements (i.e., context, controls, and images). So it becomes a matter of choice based upon your own level of skill and your own preferences as to how you like to approach things.

As a starting point, I suggest using a standard text object to display the sentence for the user. Look in the Opus Help file for: Using the Text Tool
Opus action for file management allows you to read individual lines from an external file. That gives you the option to control what is displayed, while making updating/maintenance somewhat easier.