ActivePresenter - Create software demos & simulations instantly!

ActivePresenter is a very powerful tool to create software simulations and demonstrations. Using ActivePresenter is simple and easy. To help getting started with ActivePresenter becomes even much easier; we provide some visual tutorials which describe the creation process. Especially, these contents are created by ActivePresenter itself.

The authoring process contains three steps: Capture, Edit, and Export.

• Capture:

ActivePresenter automatically records your actions on screen and insert annotations while capturing, allowing you to create demonstrations or simulations simply and easily.
Click here to learn.

• Edit:

ActivePresenter has a rich set of editing functions, allowing you to control the branching of interactive contents. You can make more abstract contents with annotation, image, and audio. Image and audio can be edited internally with built-in image editor and audio editor.
Click here to learn.

• Export:

ActivePresenter supports a variety of output formats including: Ajax, Flash simulation and interactive contents, MS Office documents, PDF, Movie (AVI, FLV, and MPEG), Images (PNG, JPEG). Each of them has many options to optimize for deploying suitably in certainly training systems.

You can download these tutorials here.

ActivePresenter supports export project to two kinds of simulation and interactive content. One is Flash-based; the other is Ajax-based. While many content authoring tools choose Flash-based as unique solution for this purpose, there are some reasons that the Flash-based content is not always used:

• Normally, Flash Player is not already installed in computer or integrated in browsers.
• Flash Player can not simulate some popular actions (right click, Alt combined key…) while working independently, or in web browser without using a trick.
• Some platforms or web browsers do not support it or it does not support them (such as Apple iPad, 64-bit browsers).
• Because the content is packed in one or few output files, it is difficult to change or reuse.

Ajax is a combination of some standard web technologies (CSS, HTML, JavaScript, etc) which currently doesn’t support animation and multimedia good as Flash does, but using Ajax-based content has many advantages:

• Almost computer which is running has web browser installed so it can display this kind of content.
• Popular actions such as right click, combination key are well-simulated (can not simulate specialized browser keys (F11, F12 in IE)).
• Because using standard web technologies, it can run in almost browsers (Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari, Opera …)
• ActivePresenter export content into data directory and presentation file (java script –based player which display the window to play simulation) separately. So you can change the player easily without exporting project again.

Sometimes, we may want to reuse the contents of a webpage in our projects, display it as the background or contents of a slide. How can we do this in ActivePresenter? Since the HTML editing and rendering are supported from ActivePresenter 2.2, this can be done simply and easily. You can use HTML to layout a slide as in the example below.

ActivePresenter supports two image formats (JPEG and PNG - Portable Network Graphics) when exporting to some types of output. Each of them has some options such as bit depth, optimization level or quality. So, how to choose the right options?

PNG (Portable Network Graphics) is a bitmapped image format that employs lossless data compression. PNG images are best suited for block images or images captured from computer's screen.

JPEG is a commonly used method of lossy compression for photographic images. JPEG images are best suited for normal pictures taken from real world (e.g. pictures taken from your digital cameras...).