Adobe Captivate 4

This month, Theo Cardiff and Matt Leathes – two Kineo people who know their way around an authoring tool or two - take a look at the latest version of Captivate. Worth the upgrade?

How they reeled Theo in:

I’m a real sucker for Adobe product demos. I watched the demo for Flash CS4 and wanted to have Flash CS4. Yes, I thought, it would be cool to create an interactive crane with a skeleton. I must have Flash CS4. Matt Leathes, our Assistant Technical Director, destroyed my fantasy by pointing out no-one with anything less than Flashplayer 10 would be able to view it and noone outside the construction industry would want to be able to view it. So Flash CS4 will have to wait for another day.

Captivate 4: The Demo

Memory:  Captivate can remember what a learner types.  So as a learner I might see the question: ‘What’s your name?’ I would answer type in ‘Theo’. On the following screen I would see “Welcome Theo.” Ok, that isn’t a particularly exciting example, but the feature is a good one.

Widgets: You can create your own custom interactions, giving more control. 

Course aggregator: Instead of one huge heavy swf, you can aggregate a number of smaller courses. This was always an issue with older versions of Captivate – file sizes got pretty unmanageable.

The demo was amazing.  Matt wasn’t around to curb my enthusiasm.  We got Captivate 4.

The Reality

OK, so Adobe Captivate remains the most effective tool for capturing and presenting interactive software simulations, and is way out in front for this.

Matt's rant

"Without getting too technical there are three key issues with Captivate.

The first is bookmarking. As it puts everything into one massive file, the presentation can’t load in fast enough for bookmarking to kick in. So the bookmarking doesn’t really work.

The next issue is SCORM compliance. Although ‘officially’ this works and seems OK if you run it through the ADL test suite, the reality is that it reports data really weirdly.  For slightly less compliant LMSs this will cause real problems.

The third is the widgets. The new widget development API introduction in Captivate 4 seemed like something worth playing with but we quickly discovered that when developing Captivate widgets in ActionScript 2.0, you don't get access to the same range of features that you do in ActionScript 3.0.

Key amongst these is the ability to have your widget be notified of when it has been removed from the screen, allowing you to stop any still-running code and clean up - something that's pretty much essential in programming good code.

These features are available if you program in ActionScript 3.0 - but then your content would only work with Flash Player 9 or above - and as much as Adobe would like you to think that everyone in the world has Flash Player 9 or 10 installed, the reality is that many corporate and public sector bodies are still running 8, 7 or sometimes even 6 - so it's not as widely usable as you'd hope.

I also found the information given about widgets in the help section poorly written and certain key concepts very badly explained. Worse, some of the ActionScript examples given were peppered with obvious syntax errors and had clearly not been given even the most cursory of checks before being put live. To their credit, when I pointed the errors out to Adobe they fixed them very quickly - but they shouldn’t be relying on their customers to do their work for them!

Captivate widgets are, I think, of fairly limited use, especially if you're having to program in AS2.0. Use them if you want but test like crazy as you do and don't try anything too ambitious to start with!"

Kineo's rating: recommended

Rant aside, the key point remains: You can't beat Captivate if you want to develop a software simulation. So on that front, we do recommend it as the best tool in the market for software simulation.

However, you need to know its limitations, and proceed with extreme caution if you try to do much other than software simulations – read on for more on this.

Criteria

Rating

Comments

Ease of use

Good

Straightforward to use. It takes a bit of time to get used to working with timelines, but with a little practice you can create software simulations pretty easily.

 

Instructional design flexibility

Average

You can have rollovers, add actions to objects (e.g. hide on click). There are a range of question types.

It doesn’t like it if you try to use questions mid course – it assumes that questions should only come at the end as a summative quiz. Not good learning design practice and this is a real restriction to the designer.

 

Ability to incorporate existing content

Good

It’s easy to incorporate audio and video. You can import from PowerPoint, but lose some ability to edit the content.

Ability to handle variety of topics

Poor

Captivate is for systems training – it does this very well.

Using it for other topics, such as soft skills, is not something we’d recommend. The instructional design flexibility is very limited. You can use widgets to bolster your design, but they are - in our experience – not stable and make for a complex development process.

We’d recommend you use it for systems training only.

Ability to incorporate graphics and media

Excellent

You can import many types of graphic, animation, video and audio. It handles all of these very well.

Ability to publish SCORM/AICC compliant courses

Poor

If your course is short, and you don’t try and go outside their idea of a course structure, you might be OK, depending on what your LMS is. We've run into a problem on a few of them

 Adobe really need to address the SCORM issue. We work around it through our own code – but that’s us, not Captivate, making it work.

Technical support available

Poor

There is a forum on their website. We have posted a few queries but haven't heard anything back. This is disappointing as support is one of the things that makes a real difference in tools companies. 

 

Use Captivate? Agree or disagree with this review? Let us know.

Got an authoring tool, and need get some help in making the most of it? Kineo’s Rapid E-learning Design Team can help. Contact us.

Kineo has accepted no payment or reward of any from any tools company for this independent review.