General Thoughts on Captivate
These are my thoughts on using Adobe Captivate. I appreciate how much effort goes into producing software, and Captivate fills an important niche in the production of web based content. Nevertheless, I feel like Captivate has not really lived up to my expectations based on my experiences with other Adobe products. I tried to submit this to their bug report/feature request form, but it was too long. Hopefully someone will see it here.
Master Slides
When I add an object to the master slide, it creates an instance of the same object on each slide. In most programs, this object would only be accessible when accessing the master slide, but for some reason, the object it editable in the filmstrip view, and must then be locked to prevent editing. This is kind of redundant and counter intuitive.
Grids
Grids are kind of useless if they only appear behind all other objects - there should be an option to place the grid on top so you can actually see it when you have an image on the slide.
Guides
Every Adobe product I've ever used has guides which one can drag from the edge of the screen. Not so with Captivate. It would be helpful to include this feature. I was able to recreate something like this by adding an outline box to the master slide, but that has it's own issues - see Master Slides section above. Also, if I wanted to use any more substantial guides, like in the middle of the screen, I would then have to remove them all before publishing - a lot of extra work. Please add guides.
Timeline
The timeline, pardon my language, is a joke. When I drag the playhead across the timeline, it should show the point at which the playhead rests. Instead it shows a strange conglomeration of all the items on the timeline in a sort of confusing collage. Instead, I have to make each item visible or invisible, and this takes lots of extra time and gets very confusing to use. I see no advantage to showing all the items on a slide at the same time. Perhaps have a check box which can enable/disable this feature if there are people who want it.
Also, when I add things to the timeline, it has a very annoying way of placing the item at the playhead location. This is fine in and of itself, however, it also insists on pushing other items around in the same process. I then have to spend extra time moving other objects back where they belong.
Playback
Related to the timeline, when I play back a media file on the timeline, it often stutters or even cuts out parts of the audio and video. This can get very frustrating, as I am unsure whether the problem is with your software, or my media files. And though this may depend upon the users hardware, I don't think it's too much to ask for smooth and consistent playback in a multimedia software such as Captivate.
Highlight Boxes - Click Boxes etc...
Highlight boxes have the words "Highlight Box" smack in the middle. This is nice if someone is an idiot and doesn't know what a highlight box is ... however, if someone actually wants to have the highlight box match something on the screen, like a button, it's annoying because of the words covering the screen image. It's really bad when the box needs to be small.
Another issue is that baxes should be interchangable. A Highlight box should have the option of being clickable or not, that way someone could add functionality to the highlight box, without having to create a separate click box. This is particularly important if more than one person is working on a project. This way, one could take someones demo recording and easily convert it into an interactive tutorial.
Yet another issue with Highlight boxes. It seems that when I use the "Fade In" functionality, somehow the whole screen changes color slightly. If I use more than one Highlight box at a time, this screen color change becomes even more pronounced. I'm not sure if this is a feature, or a bug, but there is no apparent way to turn it off.
Text Entry Boxes
The way one sets up a click box vs. how one sets up a text input is very different and inconsistent. With click boxes, there is an option to pause the slide, not so with text input - though it seems to do this by default. This is confusing. Also, with click boxes, there is an option to pause the audio, not so with text input boxes. Why not? Finally, with click boxes, there is an option to have the cursor turn into a hand pointer when rolling over the box. This option does not appear with the text input "submit" box ... these seem like very basic things that should be available for users to manipulate. My recommendation would be to make all kinds of boxes into one object type, with different options, so the user can select whether it is a text entry field, or a click box, button, or a highlight box, etc ... then the options would all be available in each case (certain things might be greyed out depending on feasability) but at least they would all be consistent. The way it is now seems random and haphazard.
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