Welcome to ActivePresenter 8! We’re excited to announce the release of a new version of ActivePresenter which includes a bunch of new features and enhancements. Thanks to that, ActivePresenter 8 lets you create more professional video demonstrations, interactive software simulations, and high-quality eLearning content much easier than ever. With the 2020 release of ActivePresenter, the app opens up a world of possibilities for everyone. Now, let’s explore what’s next.
New Features
1. User Interface Extensive Improvements & Dark Theme Support
User Interface Extensive Improvements
ActivePresenter 8 has a more streamlined user interface. The extensive improvements in UI design will make all the tools you need to create high-quality content more intuitive and accessible. That is to say, all related commands and tools are re-grouped in one tab, tailoring to the needs of users, allowing you to navigate within the application more easily. So, it leads to the introduction of two brand new tabs, namely the Insert tab and the Questions tab.
The Insert tab helps you easily focus on objects which can be inserted into your project. For example, you can enhance your videos with annotation objects such as Spotlight, Text Caption, and so on. In addition, this tab also contains various types of interactive objects like Mouse Click, Button, and more. They are helpful especially in creating contents that require user responses such as eLearning courses or interactive software simulations. Simply clicking on the object icon that you wish, inserting any in the wide range of annotations or interactive objects is just a breeze.
Meanwhile, the Questions tab includes all built-in interactive question types, tools, and commands. It gives you easy navigation to create engaging eLearning quizzes with just a few clicks. You can track and mark the learners’ results if needed as well.
Besides, icons, colors, control’s appearance are more consistent and clearer.
Dark Theme Support
Apart from the light theme that has been used in ActivePresenter 7 and older versions, ActivePresenter 8 now supports one more new theme which is a dark theme. This dark theme displays dark surfaces across the majority of a UI. It’s certainly helpful for reducing eye strain during the night or low-light environment. You can choose either of two themes by going to the View tab to change your look and feel.
2. Flex Box
Flex Box is a relatively new front-end feature that makes building a layout responsive much easier. This feature set allows managing layout and spacing consistently and efficiently, especially in responsive projects. It helps the content display perfectly on any devices with different screen sizes. Considering the convenience it brings out, ActivePresenter 8 offers Flex Box as a type of container. Objects inserted in a flex container can be laid out and aligned automatically to adapt different viewport sizes. To be more precise, Flex Box allows aligning and distributing space within a container by expanding objects to fill the available space or shrinking them to prevent overflowing.
Each object added to a Flex Box is called a flex item or flex child. You are able to freely change its width/height, rotation, alignment, and margin in the Properties pane.
3. eLearning Questions
New Built-in Question Types
As said ActivePresenter supports a variety of question types for creating interesting quizzes to boost learners’ engagement in eLearning courses. Apart from nine built-in interactive questions available in ActivePresenter 7, ActivePresenter 8 rolls out two new exciting question types, which are Fill in Blanks question and Hotspot question. You can access the Questions tab to explore these two new question types as well as nine existing ones.
The Fill in Blanks question – this new question type has a quite similar name with two question types in ActivePresenter 7 (Fill in Blank and Fill in Multiple Blanks). However, in ActivePresenter 8, their names have been changed to Fill in Text Entry and Fill in Text Entries questions to avoid confusion. These three question types share a purpose that is to require learners to fill text in blank text boxes. But the difference between the new Fill in Blanks question and the two former ones is when you have a paragraph, you are able to convert a word, a phrase, or a sentence in that paragraph into blanks. After that, the converted word/ phrase/ sentence will be automatically set as the correct answer. Not only that, you can also add new blanks, and then add correct answers for each blank in the Properties pane.
Meanwhile, the Hotspot question is an image-based question which you can use to make your courses or quizzes more engaging and exciting. This question type is related to setting the points (so-called hotspots) in an image as correct answers, then requiring learners to identify them. To be more precise, this question is specific to design games or questions such as pointing out multiple points in a picture or finding differences between the two pictures. You are free to change the hotspot’s styles the way you want.
Importing External Questions
Within ActivePresenter 8, it is available for you to import external questions with ease. Questions can be directly imported from GIFT and CSV files with a simple format. Creating format-compatible questions in these two format files and importing from them are very useful when you have to add a large number of questions into your course at once. You can quickly get your work done in one click. Just go to the Questions tab and click Import Questions From File.
4. Text Animations
ActivePresenter 8 will see the addition of the Text Animations feature. Not only the ability to add fun animations for the whole object, now texts inside it can be dynamic texts. That means they are also possible to appear, disappear or even move in an interesting way. You can create animations for text in various ways from a lot of effects in the Animations tab. It can be listed some notable text animation effects like a typewriter effect, rotation effect, drop-in effect, and more.
The eye-popping text animations are quick to be done by animating text by its letters or words. In particular, you can set the delay value for the time between letters or words appearing as you want. These options are ready to use when you double-click the effect time bar in the Timeline.
5. Embedding HTML Packages
HTML package is one kind of web objects that you can use as web-based resources to enhance your project. These resources can be websites, games, social media, and reference materials. They help increase the interactivity level of your project as well. While older versions enable you to embed resources with Address and Embed Code types that require an active URL or a line of code, this new version of ActivePresenter brings to you one more embedding option.
That is, ActivePresenter 8 also allows you to embed local HTML packages into your project without any link or code. Being said, you no longer need to upload your HTML files to a web server separately to get link or URL. You are able to embed HTML resources by selecting either HTML packages from your current project or HTML folders from your computer. After that, you can also choose an operation mode for that HTML package to decide which mode it will appear in the output. Thus, don’t miss this amazing feature out!
6. Adding Multiple Languages for Closed Captions
It’s such great news that ActivePresenter now supports adding multiple languages for a closed caption. It can be useful when the content is conveyed in different languages other than just one language. The new capability opening to you is that you can add and edit as many languages as you want. As well, you are able to set any newly added language as the default language displaying in closed captions.
After all, the player enables viewers to toggle between the languages of closed captions to any of their choices through a CC button when viewers click on it. Multiple-language closed captions definitely make your content more accessible to everyone.
Enhancements
Coming along with ready-to-use new features, ActivePresenter 8 also brings out the following enhancements.
- Improving the exporting and previewing speed up to 40%, and improving preview performance for 4K resolutions.
- Enhancing Import PowerPoint feature: ActivePresenter 8 enables you to import PowerPoint slides directly even if you do not have Microsoft PowerPoint installed on your system.
- Adding new bullet and numbering styles: More bullet and numbering style options are available for your choice.
- Offering Show-in-Mode property for the slide: You can choose operation modes (Demonstration, Tutorial, Practice, and Test) for the slide to decide which mode the slides will appear in the output.
- Adding Lock Size and Position option for objects: This option allows you to keep the object’s size and position fixed on the Canvas.
- Adding Object Settings view: Click the View tab to open the object settings view. It contains commands for editing default objects. You can select object types and customize them the way you want. All changes will apply to default settings of all newly inserted objects of that type in the current project.
- [Recording]: Improving recording simulation.
- [Recording]: Preventing the computer from sleeping while recording.
- [Recording]: Detecting device changes automatically.
- [HTML5]: Adding the option to hide player bars automatically on mobile devices.
- [HTML5]: Improving the display of Sidebar on mobile devices.
- And many other enhancements and bugs fixed.
Get ActivePresenter 8
We always try our best to bring out the best experiences and satisfaction for all ActivePresenter users. Thanks to all your feedback and feature suggestions, we have been able to continuously improve the app. As a result, now, ActivePresenter 8 is released coming along with much more amazing features for sure. Don’t forget to check out ActivePresenter’s blog to keep the ActivePresenter 8 news up to date.
So, download and let’s try it now. We’re looking forward to hearing what you feel!