SWF vs EXE

Question

Hi All

Could you great and wonderful people out there please assist
me in the following:

I have done almost all my outputs in exe format as I
specialise in demo, sim and assess of proprietary software and try
to re-create that same look and feel for the users of my product.
From the posts in this forum it appears as though the general
preferance is for swf outputs. So, could you folks please assist
and let me know what the differences are and if there is a reason
for using one format over the other??

Thanks a stack

Andrew

Captiv8r · Accepted Answer

Hi Andrew.SWF is a good choice if you are placing your Captivatecontent up on a web server. This way, you simply provide a link andyour user watches the movie. If you were to place the .EXE upthere, they would always and forever be prompted with a dialogasking which they would like to do. Run the file from here (andoften there are messages advising them how bad this can be -depends on the browser) or Save the file to their hard drive.Typically .EXE will be used if you are placing the content ona CD-ROM.The main difference between the two is that with .SWF, acertain expectation exists. That expectation is that your user hasa browser that is equipped to play Flash content. If their browserdoesn't understand Flash, they are out of luck. But a very highpercentage of browsers are "Flash capable" these days, so it's notmuch of a worry. With the .EXE output, a Flash player is included inside the.EXE. So when the .EXE is run by your user, it won't matter ifanything on the PC is Flash capable or not, because it's inside the.EXE. The only issue here is that you have different .EXE types.(Well, in version 2 of Captivate you do. Apple, LInux and Windows.Seems Captivate 3 may have changed the playing field on us again inthis respect. All I seem to be able to produce here is a Windows.EXE.)Hopefully there was something in there that helped... Rick

dchilder · Answer

Another difference between the two, meaningful to a small portion of Captivate developers...:

.EXE files are not scalable - whatever resolution you create the project in will be the size displayed by the .EXE file (as far as I've been able to tell).

You can modify the published .HTM file to make projects scale, or you can link directly to the .SWF file to make them scale to whatever resolution the user's browser is.

Many will argue that you don't want your projects to scale - they are created at a fixed size and look best at that resolution. Also, Captivate uses bitmaps to create the presentations, so they often don't scale perfectly.

However, most people capture projects at relatively low resolutions (the max usually being ~ 1024x768), and most modern computers/monitors run at 1024x768 and higher (most I see now are at least 1280x1024 or higher). This means that your presentations may be a very small percentage of the screen unless you let them scale to the full size of the user's browser.

David

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