Fundamentally Creator lets you lay out a publication or presentation as a series of pages of multimedia objects to display on a computer screen and then publish them to a number of different formats.
Creator standalone Windows programs which can be distributed freely to anyone and run on any Windows computer without Creator installed.
Flash the original standard for animation and interactive material to be published on the internet as standalone movies or as part of a website.
HTML5 the new way to publish interactive rich media content to the internet, including animation, video and game elements in a format compatible with tablets, mobile phones as well as Mac, iPad and PC.
Video use Creators animation features to produce non-interactive video for YouTube or for other video requirements.
Creator also lets you apply activities to those pages; for example, to show a series of objects in a particular order, to play a sound, view a video clip or just simply to move between pages.
You can also get information from users, make choices, ask questions and store information and no programming is required unless you want it.
The elements of Creator are:
Pages the screens that appear to users.
Objects the elements placed on a page.
Actions the things that happen in your publication.
Objects are drawn on the page using the object tools on the Tools toolbar and have a range of properties that can be edited including size, shape, border, background or even whether they use a special effect (called a transition) to appear onto, or disappear from, the screen.
Note:
Every object (even the Page and the Publication) has a Properties dialog in which you can edit various aspects of the object (including its content in the case of content objects such as images and video) see Understanding Objects, Properties and Actions for more information.
Actions are the things that happen in your publication whether they happen automatically or in response to user interaction. Actions are set off by Triggers (things that make them happen), which can be as simple as a page being displayed after a certain time interval.
Note:
Creator does not consider sounds as objects as they are not visible on the page. Instead, sounds are considered as Play Sound actions. However, we have provided a toolbar button on the Tools toolbar to allow you to add the sound action to an object easily but it remains an action.
This also means that the action is complete as soon as the sound has started so the actions of a program will continue quickly after the sound is played and will not wait for it to finish unless you specify that is what you want using the option to Wait until sound stops on the Play Sound dialog.
Triggers are attached to objects and pages. The triggers used most frequently are On Show to trigger something automatically when the object appears on screen and Left Click to respond to the most common user interaction.
Once objects are on your page, simply double-click them to edit their Properties and their Actions.
The objects and actions of your publication are displayed in the Organiser where you can reorder them or access them easily.
Creator also provides a Master Page feature, which allows you to create both objects and actions that will appear on all the pages in your publication. This saves you time recreating the same object on all your pages and is useful for including a company logo, publication title or specific object/action which is common to all pages an exit button for example.
At any point while creating your publication you caen see what it looks like and test the interactions by using the internal Preview. You can preview your current page or you can preview the whole publication from the beginning.
Once you have completed your publication.you may often wish to create a copy which will run independently, so can be displayed on any other computer without having to install Creator or even a Creator "player". You are also free to distribute this to other people, or, if appropriate, upload it to the internet for use in a website. This process is called Publishing.
See Viewing your Publication and Overview of Publishing for more information.
There are three fundamental aspects to understanding how to use Creator:
Creating objects and laying out your pages/slides
Making things happen
Publishing and distributing your publication