johnc: NetBeans, Web Analysis, and Random Ramblings

Some of the feedback I've gotten about the NetBeans J2EE Flash demo is about the sounds and the mouse boxes that show up whenever the demo clicks something. It looks like there's no agreement on it. One of the writers didn't like the visual indication of what was being clicked, but did like the clicking sounds. Roman thinks the clicking sounds are annoying. Patrick liked both the sounds and the boxes.

One thing everyone seems to agree on is that the typing noises are annoying as hell. Let's face it, it's been a long long time since any of us typed on a typewriter, so why not use the soft clicking of a computer keyboard for the typing sound? Funny that the industry hasn't come up with the staple "computer keyboard" sound yet..

Anyway, I'd like to turn the sounds off but I can't figure out where to do it. Would also like to adjust the default length that Captivate pauses at the beginning of each slide - the default 1.5 seconds is way too long and it's a pain to adjust 150+ slides manually.

Now that I'm really rolling on the Captivate nit list, here's some more:

• Should be able to merge several slides into one slide. Without having to copy and paste all the objects (mouse actions, pauses, etc.) in. This would solve the sound problem and make the forward/back buttons actually useful. (Roman suggests just getting rid of forward and back, since they aren't useful. May have to do that, but as Roman says, it's an ugly solution. In a 8 minute demo, users may very rightfully want to back up if they start spacing out.)
• Importing slides from another presentation is awful. Can't specify which slide to put them after, they often come in out of order, and moving more than ten slides at a time freezes Captivate.
• Captivate's performance reminds me of NetBeans 3.4! Startup time is atrocious, saving projects takes over a minute, and the file sizes are huge.
• Capturing typing is yucky. It often doesn't capture everything as you type and when you're using code completion it's really not obvious what's going on. What I'd like to do is turn Full Motion Recording on when I'm recording typing, but Captivate only does Full Motion Recording when you drag and drop something. There's no way to manually switch it on for a period of time. This is one place where Wink wins out.

OK, that's it for now. If there's any Captivate fans out there, you'll probably tell me that all of this is possible and to RTFM. (I did, I swear!)