"I choose to defend Captivate when someone makes wildly exagerated remarks and denigrates the app unfairly. The talented designers and programmers that create Captivate are not allowed to chime in on this forum and tell posters how they feel when their work gets disparaged. I like to speak up for them every so often."
Where's the exaggeration? Where's the unfair denegration? I'm 100% certain that even the "talented designers and programmers that create Captivate" are painfully aware that the application teeters on a rotted-out foundation of 15-plus-year-old code from its RoboDemo days. To recognize this obvious fact is not at all an attack on Adobe's developer-level employees, but on Adobe itself and its lack of investment/attention to Captivate. I mean, you can't even find Captivate on Adobe's website without some serious digging! It's almost as if they don't want to claim it. Captivate doesn't provide native Illustrator file support (though both applications are from Adobe), forcing me to export all my Illustrator work to SVG (!!!) before bringing it into Captivate. Sure, it will do roundtrip editing with Illustrator, but again, only after you do the tedious SVG conversions manually. The interface, as I mentioned earlier, is neither Windows-like nor Mac-like. It's a jarring contrast from the UI conventions of either OS. You can't get Captivate in any type of Creative Cloud bundle. Captivate integrates with eLearning Brothers (great guys, mediocre assets) rather than the far-superior Adobe Stock (which, granted, doesn't offer character options). Adobe employees are nearly non-existent on this forum and rely on unpaid evangelists (like you) to provide support for their product. And most of the Captivate folks are in India, resulting in both a time-zone and language barrier.
For not being the "market leader," Articulate is many lightyears ahead in customer engagement. Their online community is top-notch, they have a legion of staff that actively participates in the forums, their product updates are frequent, and their ease-of-use blows Captivate away (though still lacking some of the power). If not for the fact my employer is tied to Captivate via a multi-year licensing arrangement, and the fact that Captivate provides a sorta-Mac-native version I can use personally for my freelance work (so I only need master one tool, not two), I wouldn't give it a second look. It's a crying shame Articulate abandoned its plans for a Mac version of Storyline.
As I mentioned earlier, Captivate still can't run correctly using a 5-year-old Mac display resolution standard, and in fact can't run correctly at all on the major macOS update released TWO MONTHS AGO (hence this thread). Meanwhile, on my work machine (not-cutting-edge-but-not-antique HP with i5 processor and 16 GB of RAM running Windows 10) I wait a full minute-twenty-seconds for Captivate to launch. Importing PowerPoint files is nearly worthless, when it works at all. So much for our bright idea to have our SMEs work a lot of the baseline content in PowerPoint (for which they all have licenses) and then import it into Captivate (for which only we instructional designers have licenses) for final development: Captivate turns all the content from that PowerPoint slide into a single inseparable, uneditable asset. And of course just to get the mostly-useless PowerPoint import to work at all requires a workaround. For me and all my team members, trying to import a PowerPoint results in an "insufficient memory to launch PowerPoint" message, UNLESS YOU LAUNCH POWERPOINT FIRST, in which case it works just fine (I guess Captivate is lying about the memory thing). Oh, and Captivate includes must-have JSON files in its output, which is a verboten file type on many corporate SharePoint servers (including ours). Oops.
Captivate works flawlessly for you? Great! Lucky you! But those of us for whom it does not, in fact, work great are many. You say it works well if you know how to use it "properly", meaning knowing the tricks and workarounds to evade its many bugs and limitations, like my grandpa scoffing at the inability to start his truck by turning the key when he could instead do so by pointing it downhill and giving it a good shove before jumping in and popping the cluch. "It's not a bug, it's a feature!"
Many of us would just prefer that Captivate, you know, work well without all the crazy contortions and tricks learned over many hours of failure and misery. This doesn't seem like an unrealistic expection from a software product on version 11.5 from a major software company like Adobe.
I want Captivate to be awesome. I really do. Does Adobe?
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