Optimising Captivate 4/5 captures for speed

Since SWF is a streaming format, and you can set your Preloader percentages to suit end user bandwidth, you should be able to find a combination that works well with your delivery platform and target audience.  But Citrix is usually used because end user bandwidth is insufficient to support normal network traffic.  So if your client is trying to get Flash content to work over Citrix, they are bound for a rough ride...especially since Flash content is usually animated and contains audio files (most customers using Citrix don't allow audio over it anyway because of the bandwidth the audio consumes).  Your customer might be better off with plain static content if all they have to work with is Citrix.

For what you get (text, images, animation, audio all wrapped in a single compressed package), the SWF format is by far the most versatile and economical package.  Try delivering all of this same functionality via other methods (e.g. pure uncompressed HTML and Javascripting)  and I think you'll find you're up for more download than Flash.

The fact is that Flash format used to be the poster child for the web.  But it's currently in fashion to criticise it in favour of technologies like HTML5 that haven't actually arrived, let alone proven they can duplicate Flash performance and functionality.

If you client wants to ditch Flash as their delivery platform...I say let them go ahead.  The next thing they'll be complaining about is how what they end up with as a solution doesn't deliver the interactivity and sophistication users have become accustomed to with Flash content.  And HTML5 is going to be a lot harder to build and support in the short term as well because it's still too new.  There are no tools like Captivate to use to build it.

I think it's time people actually found out the hard way why Flash enjoys its popularity in the e-learning community and among tool vendors.