Announcing the Launch of Adobe Captivate 12.3 - Reinventing the Legend

Whoa, just cracked open the new version 12.4, coming from CP 19. I thought this would be easy to use. Ouch ... where is control over styles and master slides? Is it me, or this a dumb-downed approach to e-learning? In the past I always touted the software simulation of CP as it's strong point, but having seen folks use Storyline, I wonder if that platform has improved it's software sim features?

Why for the love of good cant adobe just put the money and effort to enhance captivate classic. It's by far the best tool for us that wants to build courses from scratch without limitations. Our customers love the courses. We were trying out the all new version but quickly understood that this would never match the quality that our customers demand. Let Rise do what you are trying to do and make Classic even better.

I am in complete agreement with Lilybiri, QzBassist, RodWard and I'm sure many more users out there.  In your efforts to bring Captivate to the Cloud, you have "thrown the baby out with the bathwater".  The list of functions that Captivate will no longer perform is much to long to list here.  Suffice it to say, the program no longer resembles the Captivate that we have grown to use and love.  At least when .swf files were no longer an option in websites, the name of the flash program was changed (Animate) while the program only recieved minor changes.  If you want to play "bait and switch", at least have the decency to change the name of the new Captivate so that everyone will recognize that it is a different program from the start.

I just had a 4 day contract to  teach this version to students belonging to  a large government organisation who was considering moving away from Storyline. I had instructional designers, developers (both Captivate 2019 and Storyline), as well as management in my room.
Where they were impressed with the reasonably seamless responsive nature, they said that they deliver content only to a desktop environment (which I find in over 90% of my clients - I've only ever had a couple that wanted to deliver to a mobile phone environment). So the massive feature that seems to have killed replication of what used to be dead easy on CP2019 (ability to layer objects) was completely useless to them. A couple even laughed.

While trying to demonstrate a really cool feature - the hotspot widget - they wondered why you could only place 6 hotspots on the screen at any one time, and why it was impossible to scale the hotspots to overlap areas with larger interactive requirements. Cp2019 offered a few solutions to this, including the ability to create odd-shaped polygons and add actions to them. Failed this test too, as expected.

The only thing they really liked that they felt would be useful was the ability to add cue points (my bad - bookmarks) and assign functionality to them.

Despite the availability of a myriad of pre-made templates, none of them were able to recreate the modules that they used, and the lack of the Master Slides and nameable object styles was pretty much the deal breaker.

To cut a long story short, what was booked as a 4 day gig was curtailed after the first day because they couldn't understand why the hype about the product was lacking in such an obvious way.

So the upshot is that they won't be specifying a wholesale move to Captivate 12, and they will be working hard to repurpose a few thousand CP2019 projects to another platform before the deadline expires.

Having worked on the Charm Beta team myself, I'm pretty gutted that they'll not be using it, and even worse that I'll probably be losing the client as a result.

Cheers Adobe - all the promises about reaching parity on CP2019 'soon' are just hot air.  As you can tell, I'm not really impressed.

Just a question: when will the update process become as smooth as for the Adobe CC applications?

I always use the Update option in the Help menu. In previous versions of Captivate this was available from the Welcome screen, in this 'New' version not, you need to open a new or existing project to access that option.  I had closed all projects in the new Captivate and closed Captivate Classic as well. I opened a new project in Captivate, and tried to install the update from the menu.

Of course, you get an error because you need to close Captivate. But even if you closed it, the error continues to appear because I had not restarted my laptop, and Captivate didn't realize that projects were closed. So I needed to restart the laptop and the process: open Captivate, open a new project, start the update, close Captivate. This feels very user unfriendly.