Just found and installed Salasaga. Looks great! I'm excited.
Cool! Which platform are you on?
From the looks of things you make presentations a frame at a time in a window using printscreen as you go?
Kind of.
Generally you:
1. Start the program you want to make eLearning of, and position it how you want for taking window captures of. (size, location)
2. Start Salasaga, then click the Capture button
3. Salasaga will ask for the window you want to capture. Using the mouse, go and click on it. Salasaga will take note of the windows' position and dimensions
4. Switch back to the program you want to capture, then press the window capture key combination. Generally this will be "Control Printscreen" if you're using metacity.
5. Keep using the program you want to capture, pressing the window capture key combination as you need.
6. Switch back to Salasaga and click the Import icon. The window captures you've done will be loaded into the film strip.
7. Save your project.
8. Use the layer creation tools, to create text, highlights, mouse cursors, and import other images as needed.
9. Edit the project properties to ensure you have a decent frame rate (makes movement smoother), correct project name, etc.
10. Export the project to a swf file and test that it's working ok, see what needs adjusting, etc.
Something I've noticed is that the position of elements on screen, versus where they are in the exported swf is sometimes slightly off. At least for mouse cursors anyway. Text seems to be wider in the exported swf too.
Pretty much this means that after exporting the swf, you need to go and readjust the project positions and text sizes until the exported swf has things how you want them to be.
These are definitely things that need to be fixed before a proper release of course, it's just how they are for the moment is all.
Btw - it's much easier to work with the short cut keys for manipulating slides, rather than using the mouse. This is because there's no drag and drop nor right click context menu in place for the film strip yet, so moving slides around by mouse is really a pain.
Can you have sound too?
That's on the To Do list. For the moment, the only sound possible is mouse clicks, set in the properties for mouse layers.
That's new code btw, and I'm still getting the hang of how to work with sound using the ming library (which generates the swf).
Under Edit -> Properties I set the background to white - I hate black backgrounds - but it's still black.
Ahhh. Edit -> Properties is the place to set the application's "default preferences". When you create a new project (File -> New) then these get picked up and used for the new project. You probably want to set the background colour in Project -> Preferences, at which point all new slides will have the colour you choose.
(Which also means that when you change the colour in Edit -> Properties, the next projects you create will have the new background colour set for their default).
At least I think it is. I have so far made a one frame presentation, and it has a black background
Heh.
Choose the background "Empty" layer for your slide, then click the "Edit" icon in the layer properties. This lets you change the properties of an existing layer, such as the colour for "Empty" layers.
Can't wait for the beta. Hope it has at least a cursory description of how to run the program.
Very much agree with you. 99% focus has been on "make it at least work".
After Alpha1 was released, I started using it to create some initial guides (for how to install on Ubuntu). But, it was just still too buggy, so I didn't get more than about 60% of the way through before getting fed up.
Then fixed those bugs, tweaked a few other things, and added the initial mouse click sound support. The result is Alpha 2.
Hoping it's in a decent enough state now to complete some initial guides, even with all the rough edges. Will find out soon eh?
Thanks for taking the time to build this.
Not a problem. I feel it's important (in lots of ways) to get this done.
