Category Archives: Captivate

Update Captivate for 2017

Captivate 2017 (v.10) was released a couple months ago.

The brightest update – ‘Fluid Boxes’ which help you to create truly responsive pieces for your multi-device delivery. From their site, Continue reading Update Captivate for 2017

Authoring Tool Updates

New software updatesEdit 3/14/16: Adobe has released an official update for Captivate 9. Most of you should be able to open Captivate and select Help > Updates to launch the Adobe Application Manager and select the release. For those of you who need an alternate method, you can download the patch from the CP Downloads page. See the Release Notes and this Adobe Blog post for more details on this rather extensive update, including new Responsive Skins, improved ‘Roundtripping’, and improved Rulers, Guides, and State options.

A summary of current (as of this post) updates for the more ‘popular’ eLearning development tools; Lectora, Storyline, and Captivate – along with thoughts on a couple other tools: Continue reading Authoring Tool Updates

Updates! Captivate 9 and Prime (Adobe LMS)

Big update news from Adobe! A long-awaited update to Captivate, now at version 9, AND a new LMS product – Captivate Prime. I new this LMS was coming but assumed it would be an extension or adaptation of Adobe Connect, so was surprised to see Captivate Prime and not Connect Prime. Looks like Adobe has put significant effort into this LMS product, building it from scratch (?) as opposed to sticking a new UI or plugin on to their mature Connect platform.

First, back to Captivate 9 itself. As with all their version updates, this new release includes some solid updates. Two of the most exciting for this old Captivate developer: Continue reading Updates! Captivate 9 and Prime (Adobe LMS)

Adobe TechCommSuite 2015 release

TCS-ProductsResponsive HTML5 output and Right-to-Left (RtL) language support! Two significant updates to the latest release of Adobe’s Technical Communication Suite. Targeted as a “publishing toolkit for technical writers, help and policy authors, and instructional designers”, Adobe’s TCS includes:

  • Acrobat Pro DC – “The complete PDF solution for working anywhere
  • Captivate 8 – “Everything you need to create eLearning courseware
  • FrameMaker 2015 – “Easily author bidirectional technical content and publish across mobile devices
  • RoboHelp 2015 – “Deliver personalized content across platforms and mobile devices
  • Presenter 10 – “Video creation was never this easy

While those versions of Captivate and Presenter have been out for a while, the updates to Framemaker and RoboHelp allow the entire TCS to finally hit a new release (release notes). Continue reading Adobe TechCommSuite 2015 release

Text-to-Speech in Captivate 8

CP8 and TTSCaptivate continues to provide one of the more robust text-to-speech (TTS) features among the various authoring products. It not only ships with multiple voices but can access the TTS options on your Windows computer as well (I’m not sure about Mac system access though).

But it’s not necessarily an easy process to setup, so in concert with eLearning Brothers, I submitted a post “Captivate 8: Working with Text-to-Speech and Voices” a couple weeks ago – though I’m just getting around to mentioning it now 🙂 Continue reading Text-to-Speech in Captivate 8

Creative Cloud 2015 – Upgrade Cautions

CC2015-installIssues01Adobe recently released a pretty substantial update to their Creative Cloud (CC) product. Included are updates to many of the products, a return of Adobe Stock Images (though at additional cost) through a partnership with Fotolia, and a variety of bug fixes (release notes and a much-more detailed blog post on update specifics).

CC2015-stock01Update with caution! With substantial updates to the child products, when you install each update the default option is to have the previous versions *removed*. This is different than previous updates’ defaults and is a concern for a variety of reasons: Continue reading Creative Cloud 2015 – Upgrade Cautions

Interactive Video in Adobe Captivate 8

We’ve talked about this a bit on our Recipes page, but eLearning Brothers asked for a more detailed contribution, so here it is:

Helpful Tip: Interactive Video in Adobe Captivate 8

In brief, Captivate allows you “to place a video on the actual Captivate timeline as ‘synchronized’ video. With the video playback extended along the timeline itself, you can match other Captivate components with that playback….So not only can you time captions and callouts with the video, you can also overlay click boxes.”

Need to step someone through the any particular process? Film the process, integrate the video into a Captivate project, then overlay click boxes to stop the video and ask the learner to ‘click the next step’ – maybe it’s a button to press, or select the correct piece of equipment, or identify a safety hazard…

Provide feedback on the learner’s click and continue the video playback, showing the correct ‘next step’ in the process.

Video is a great way to demonstrate any given procedure…and you can enhance actual *learning* by asking the user to actually interact with the video (albeit to a limited degree).

Visit the eLearning Brothers site to learn more and for links to a sample published project and the source file (Captivate 8). The sample project uses two videos from the eLearning Brothers rather deep ‘Stock Assets’ portfolio.

Any other tips or suggestions regarding video and Captivate 8? Share those thoughts here in our Comments, or head on over to the ‘eLB’ site and share there!

Even more Captivate 8 resources

Working with Captivate 8 more and more, the locked-down workspaces really annoyed me. For example, I have two monitors so prefer to have the timeline panel on one monitor (along with a couple other panels) and the main development view on the other. The ‘default’ workspace in CP8, however, doesn’t allow panels to be undocked!

So quick pointer: do Edit > Preferences, then on the resulting screen select ‘Enable custom workspaces/panel undocking’. Continue reading Even more Captivate 8 resources

Adobe Captivate News & Resources

Captivate on Google Chrome

There have been many reports of user having playback issues with their HTML5 output from Captivate (i.e. sound and/or video not playing back properly). While those investigations are ongoing, one issue specific to Google Chrome (v.36) has been addressed by Adobe.

Per the Adobe Blog, there are two primary issues:

  • Issue 1: HTML 5 content freezes on launch in Chrome 36 with a JavaScript error.
  • Issue 2: Slide backgrounds with gradients may not appear correctly.

Continue reading Adobe Captivate News & Resources