Adobe Captivate

[garethdavis]

I've used Adobe tools for years and most of them are very good - but I think they should come clean on Captivate and admit that it's a neglected and/or failed product. I've used it on and off for about 12 years but hardly at all in the past 3; and having come back to it recently at a client's behest, I'm astonished at how bad it is. 

I'm no mug as a developer - I spend a lot of time using game engines, and I spend probably 50% of my dev time in Captivate working around the endless list of glitches, blind alleys and bizare interface issues.

As far as I can tell the only thing it has going for it over Storyline is that it's about a third of the cost. It used to be more of a grown up version of SL but SL (whilst still having its own problems) has overtaken it significantly in the past few years. I'm interested in what Adobe's plans are for this product in the near future. Kind regards

[Stagprime]

I've used Captivate for many years.

The last thing I would call it is a failed product.

Does it have some things that could be better? Sure.

I could say that about any product out there.

Just because a product doesn't align with all of my preferences doesn't make it a failure.

[garethdavis]

What things do you think it could do better, out of interest? 

[Stagprime]

Here is an easy quick five frustrations I have...

1.  That play button screen when you launch a project. Simply not needed. Spent tons of time finding a workaround.
2.  Automatically adding the extra states and animation to buttons. Waste tons of time deleting them.
3.  Fonts. Blurry. Variable hack forces unwanted fonts. Upgrading makes you go back and change them all.
4.  Random renaming of assets on the backside. Like beep.mp3 becomes  2345.mp3 or some dumb thing.
5.  Small JavaScript box

These frustrate me but they are not "deal breakers". Amazing things can be accomplished with Captivate.

[garethdavis]

Slide videos that rescale randomly when you publish 

Why have slide videos and event videos - why not just vidoes with 100% functional control over instead of one with playback and one with CC option?  

Why control slides with outdated pause features on random buttons so you can pick up a module with 73 pauses on one slide? 

Why not have layers given almost every other Adobe product does? 

Why not have scenes? (I know these are SL features but Captivate's unwillingness to add them as features is a huge L) 

The general formating of elements such as Quiz questions is a joke I'm afraid. 

One thing I do prefer it over SL is the ability to maniuplate objects directly across the project rather than via a variables and slide triggers but as someone who has worked in and about the industy for 15 years or so, Articulate is killing Captivate. A novice can build a complex piece in the former whilst putting together something simple in Captivate is a migrane. There's a tonne of other stuff in dire need of attenttion too - I'll compile it one day