Rating:

In a hurry?  Recommendation   

I had no problems installing eLearning Suite. It took a while to install because many of the programs in the Suite are large. Although I installed everything, I am only reviewing Captivate here.

Captivate is much more full-featured in this version than in the past. That means that I had to decide what I wanted to test for this review since it would be impossible to test everything without taking months.

GETTING STARTED
I decided to test building and using a template and developing an application demo because I can see that I will use these features often. I'm telling you this because you may be more or less interested in other features so you should view this review through the lens of your own needs.

Captivate opening screen

The graphic above shows the opening screen of the Captivate program. You'll notice that some of the options for creating a new project and creating templates are new. The Getting Started Tutorials are expanded and the ones I tried were quite helpful. If you have used previous versions of Captivate, I recommend you start with the archived version of a terrific two-hour webinar that R.J. Jacquez, Senior Product Evangelist for eLearning and Technical Communications, gave on Captivate's new features. Here's the link. You'll need to use your Adobe ID or create one.

In two short hours, I felt like I had a good handle on the new features and was psyched to play with the application. (Okay, that's not quite true. I was so psyched that I regularly stopped the archived webinar to play. Couldn't wait.)

If you're new to Captivate, the best place to start, in my opinion, is with the Workflow Videos that are available here and with the Getting Started tutorials available on the opening screen.

Start software simulation

Start blank project

The two graphics above show the dialog boxes that open when you click the Software Simulation and Blank Project items, respectively, from the opening screen.

HELP
The Captivate 4 Help Viewer relies on Adobe AIR technology. When online, help searches can include postings in Adobe's Community forums and Adobe blogs. Figure 5 shows the community answers that popped up when I searched on Flash player and Captivate 4.

Since AIR blends online and offline experiences, help topics can be updated over time. Fantastic idea. But less than fantastic results in some cases. For example, when I searched on "zoom area," it took a while to find the basic information I wanted. I did better at just playing with the zoom area (Insert>Standard Objects>Zoom Area) to see how it worked. But to be fair, when I searched on "PDF," I easily found what I was looking for.

And here's another thing that drove me crazy when searching for help on specific topics. It looks to me like all the help information for all of the Adobe products is provided using the same system.

Help search results for "skin"

So when I searched for "skin" and included community resources, I got results for tools other than Captivate 4. So start your help searches by searching in the help system only if you don't want to get results for other tools.

You can view the help documents inside the Adobe Help Viewer and also download the help docs to PDF (these docs may be updated so you may want to download this from time to time to have the newest version). When I didn't want to sift through the topics that appeared when searching, I simply used the help documents.

In most cases, I found what I was looking for fairly easily. The help documents provided with this new version of Captivate seem better than those that came with previous versions.

There are some nifty features that go along with the Adobe Help Viewer. You can bookmark help topics that you find useful so you can easily find them later. Captivate movies are embedded in some of the topics.

Adding outside links to Captivate help

You can also add outside web resources to your help, as shown above. When you click on any of the links in your help favorites, they open in the help Viewer. I gotta say this… this is quite a slick improvement. Being able to add your own links is a fantastic idea. I hope other authoring tool vendors read this.

Recommendation
See Part 5.

Part 1: Game Changer | Part 2: Getting Started | Part 3: Developing Templates | Part 4: New Features | Part 5: Final Thoughts

CAPTIVATE, PART 2 Rating