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E-Learning Solutions (Content & Assessment Authoring)

RapidBuilder^® v5.0 Deluxe Features and Benefits (At a Glance ...)

• Continuous Desktop Capturing - RapidBuilder uses a continuous "pixel-based" desktop capturing technique. Rather than taking a snapshot of each screen within the software application, RapidBuilder captures pixel changes from screen to screen during the live recording (similar to a video camcorder). This enables RapidBuilder to record and completely capture all live desktop activity and full-motion interactions with 16 or 32-bit Windows or web-based applications (including screen changes, mouse movements, mouse clicks, keyboard entries, menu interactions, dialog box interactivity, etc.). RapidBuilder's unique capturing capability enables developers to create interactive or non-interactive software simulations easily (i.e., with reduced time and effort).
  
  
• Recorded Mouse Clicks - In RapidBuilder, any mouse clicks made during the recording are captured and automatically available during playback. During the authoring stage, each captured mouse click can be easily resized, moved to another location on the screen, changed to another type of mouse click, disabled, or removed. For each mouse click, the developer may also customize the target image (i.e., the icon image representing the mouse click area on the screen) and the mouse over image (i.e., the cursor image that appears when the mouse pointer is placed over the mouse click area).
  
  
• Recorded & Authored Keystrokes - In RapidBuilder, any keystrokes typed during the recording are captured and automatically available during playback. Each captured keystroke can be easily changed to another type of keystroke, disabled, or removed. In addition, during the authoring stage, the developer may manually specify multiple keystrokes on each frame/screen. Each keystroke (recorded during capturing or added during authoring) can be set to perform a different action (such as navigating to another frame/screen, launching an external file, playing an audio file, displaying a pop-up text message, exiting playback, etc.) when pressed by the user at runtime.
  
  
• Recorded & Authored Mouse Movements - In RapidBuilder, all mouse pointer movements made during the recording are captured and automatically available during playback. In addition, during authoring, multiple mouse movements can be added to each frame/screen in the file. These added mouse movements can be initiated manually (by the user) or automatically (by the system) at playback time, and an action/event (i.e., navigating to another frame/screen or launching an external file) may be automatically triggered once the mouse movement has completed. In addition, for the mouse movements, developers can define the cursor image that will display when the mouse movement is being shown on the screen. This can be changed from screen to screen, or the same cursor image can be applied across multiple screens.
  
  
• Interactive, Non-Interactive, and Combination - RapidBuilder can record software simulations that are interactive (where the end user directly interacts with the simulation by clicking the mouse and pressing keys), non-interactive (where the simulation plays back as a self-running "movie" that the end user simply watches without participating), or a combination of both interactive and non-interactive elements.
  
  
• Ready-Made Simulations - As soon as capturing is completed, the recorded software simulation is fully generated (with the recorded interactivity built in and all of the recorded screens automatically linked together) and is immediately ready for playback. The developer can play/deploy the ready-made simulation without the need to perform any authoring/editing.
  
  
• Unicode Support - XStream Software also offers a Unicode-enabled version of RapidBuilder that fully supports the Unicode character set (for encoding multiple written languages). This provides the flexibility to create multilingual simulations and courses for distribution to a globally diverse international audience. For more information, click here.
  
  
• Record Text/DOS-based Applications - XStream Software also offers a special version of RapidBuilder that fully captures all interactivity in text/DOS-based applications (in addition to Windows and web-based applications). This type of simulation capturing functionality is very difficult to find in other simulation products/technologies.
  
  
• Customize Pre-Capture Options/Settings - Developers may control how much of the desktop area will be captured (i.e., the entire desktop, a selected screen area, or only active windows) as well as define a large number of other settings to determine the scope and content of the recorded simulation.
  
  
• Generate Automatic Text Captions/Instructions - RapidBuilder enables you to automatically generate text captions/instructions for the user actions recorded during capturing. You can use RapidBuilder's default automatic instruction generation options or customize a large variety of options to control the display of the automatic instructions.
  
  
• Record Background Sound/Narration - You may record background sound/narration while simultaneously capturing your software simulation.
  
  
• 80-97% File Compression - Using powerful proprietary compression algorithms, RapidBuilder generates efficiently small files. This allows for richly authored simulations without the worry of greatly increased file size.
  
  
• Non-Recorded Content Files - In addition to recording software simulations, RapidBuilder can be used to create all types of non-recorded content. Content-based screens (including appended/inserted frames, pre-defined screen templates, imported video frames, and imported images) can be added to recorded simulations, and developers can also create exclusive non-recorded content files of all types, including CBTs, WBTs, assessments, tutorials, presentations, slideshows, product demos, help files, and more. Developers have the flexibility to create RapidBuilder files containing only captured/recorded screens, files containing only authored content screens, and files containing a combination of captured screens and content screens.
  
  
• E-Learning Projects/Courses - RapidBuilder includes capabilities for creating powerful e-learning projects/courses (with built-in bookmarking and progress tracking capabilities). A course created in RapidBuilder is divided into a set of lessons that consist of topics and subtopics. Each topic and subtopic can contain one screen (referred to as a "frame" in RapidBuilder) or multiple screens. The user can progress through the course in a linear fashion or by picking and choosing the lessons, topics, subtopics or specific frames to progress through and the order in which to progress through these elements that comprise a course. The projects/courses created in RapidBuilder may be deployed as standalone files, and they may also be registered and deployed through the web-based XStream RapidShare Learning Management System (LMS) for comprehensive tracking and reporting.

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