Captivate has lost the battle

I'll admit I have more experience with Articulate software than with Captivate, but in trying to transition to Captivate for a few reasons (including cost and offering a Mac-native application), I've found many things frustrating if not infuriating. Performance of the Mac version of Captivate is horrific - moving elements on-screen is like dragging them through tar. No, it's not my hardware: amazingly, Captivate for Windows runs much more smoothly on my Mac (via Parallels Desktop) than the actual Mac native version does!!!

And you can't directly import an Adobe Illustrator file into Captivate, you have to export it to SVG first? So one Adobe application doesn't support native file import from another Adobe application? WHAT??? I also find the Captivate interface to be user-hostile and completely unintuitive - sadly, not a lot of thought is going into designing the user experience. Captivate seems to be treated by Adobe as a forgotten overseas side hobby and not as a legitimate part of their software portfolio, and that's a real shame. I wish they'd just sell Captivate to another vendor who cares or spin it off into its own company where it might have a chance to thrive.

Also, the online community for Captivate trails Articulate's by light-years. Articulate actually has staff that participates in the forum discussions - they don't rely on users to provide all their support! Getting an answer to a question on the Articulate forums can be nearly instantaneous and almost always helpful. Post a question to the Captivate forum and you risk being criticized for not fitting into the approved mold, if anyone responds at all. It really is a night-and-day experience when compared to Articulate's excellent online community. Again, it all seems to come down to Adobe not really caring about Captivate.

I was crushed when Articulate abandoned their plan for a native Mac version of Storyline. Also, their subscription pricing now borders on ludicrous. Captivate thumps Articulate in price and in Mac support. Too bad the software itself just isn't very good, and doesn't seem to be getting much better very quickly.

I've gotta say, I'm a long-time Captivate user myself. I've been with this product since the first version. I also have Storyline, and I've used Lectora, as well. Hands-down, Captivate is my favorite. I periodically develop simple projects in Storyline, just to keep the skills fresh, but I will never again develop a complex project with that software. I feel like I'm using PowerPoint the whole time, which I can adapt to, although I don't like it. But the Storyline interface is ridiculously clunky, and it typically takes me 2-3 clicks to do anything, as opposed to 1-2 with Captivate. The advanced actions that I'm used to in Captivate work differently in Storyline (or they don't have anything equivalent). So something that I can do simply in Captivate requires a workaround taking hours to put together in Storyline. Not to say that Captivate 2017 isn't a bit buggy (preview in browser doesn't work, spellchecker in the Notes section doesn't work, a project I imported from Captivate 8 doesn't work anymore because there are apparently too many buttons on the slide, etc.).

Anyway. I'm not arguing your points, I'm just sharing my own opinion and experiences. Best of luck to you!

I'm just a user like you, and would like to talk with you.

That Captivate no longer can support FLV but had to replace it by MP4 format for video, is due to the imposed switch from SWF output to HTML5 output which doesn't support any flash-based format like FLV. MP4 is not supporting transparency AFAIK.

I susptect there are tweaking possibilites but can't find a link immediately.

What do you mean by audio on hover?  If you mean attaching audio to a Rollover state of an interactive object that is pretty easy:

• Go into Object State panel
• Select the Rollover state
• Add a shape, attach the audio as object audio to that shepe
• Make the shape invisible by setting Alpha and Stroke to 0

You'll have the audio playing on rollover.

If you means something different, please tell me.

I wish you more luck with another authoring tool, but suspect you'll be missing the Library, shared actions, and the possibility to create a full responsive project.