It's really very simple. THERE'S NO MONEY IN HTML5 WIDGETS.
Here are the reasons from the perspective of a widget developer:
- Any good widget requires a significant investment of time to code, debug, and then support. Unless he's purely building widgets for the love of coding, the developer will naturally be expecting some kind of remuneration in return to make all that effort worthwhile.
- Almost every new version of Captivate that came out contained changes that broke all existing third party widgets. This meant that widget developers faced a maintenance nightmare with each new Cp version release requiring recoding and re-release of all widgets they sold or supported. This happened time and time again. It was nauseating.
- SWF widgets were relatively straightforward to support. All you were really supporting was compatibility with the Cp editing environment and the Flash Player. You didn't need to worry much about which browser the published output was playing in. By contrast, HTML5 is a nightmare to support. Not only are there several different mobile browsers, there are a plethora of mobile devices and Operating Systems / versions. The sheer number of permutations is mind-blowing and impossible to guarantee for compatibility.
- As was their practice with earlier Cp versions (and their right as the owner of the software), Adobe continues to make changes to the underlying architecture of the application. This is VERY much the case at the moment with their evolving JavaScript API for mobile output. But each new change is likely to break any HTML5 widget based on that API.
- The reality is that to be commercially viable widgets should cost hundreds of dollars each. But Captivate authors typically don't usually want to pay for widgets at all. They expect to get widgets bundled for free with Captivate. So they usually expect all third-party widgets should be either free or very inexpensive, regardless of how long they took to create, or how onerous they may be to support on all platforms. (I often see Captivate authors on the forums say they "Don't have a budget for widgets", despite the fact that they're willing to spend days or weeks trying to solve a problem that is fixed by a widget costing less than one hour of their time.)
So put yourself in the place of a widget developer trying to make a living to feed his family:
- Would you willingly work for peanuts earning a few hundred dollars PER MONTH building widgets, and then have your customers all complaining about the widgets in their projects breaking each and every time they update to the new version of Captivate?
Or... - Would you prefer to earn hundreds of dollars PER DAY just using your skills with Captivate to build e-learning courses for clients, who will then willingly PAY you EXTRA for changes when they opt to update those courses to the next version of Captivate.
I'm no accountant, but even I can see where the money is...
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