Not recommending Captivate 8 for use on mobile devices

[Stimpski]

Hi everyone,

I thought I'd share an experience I've been having over the last few months.

The organization I work for had a project to produce an e-learning course for a client. The client wanted a desktop, tablet, and a smartphone version. Captivate 8 had recently been released and it looked like it could fit our needs well. I was looking forward to working with it.

I'm going to skip the details, but Captivate 8 did not work out well. I am an advanced Captivate user, and a skilled interactive designer/developer, and I was frustrated to a high degree with Captivate's constant issues. I'm now of the firm opinion that I won't be recommending Captivate 8 to clients and project managers at my organization for any learning materials on mobile devices.

I'm really happy to have a discussion with anyone who's interested about the issues I faced and hear about other people's issues. Perhaps something good will come from it.

[RodWard]

Sorry to hear you had issues with getting mobile content to work. However, this is by no means a rare occurrence. HTML5 is still very much a 'work in progress'.

I would suggest you simply list your issues here in this post so that those in this community who might have solutions could share them and anything that is a known bug could then be reported.

Your information so far is too vague to be of much benefit.

[windscorpion]

Well for what its worth i've got about 70 (roughly 420 separate modules) courses done and being used by our learners in CP8 that work pretty well with mobile devices. Some compromises have to be made but i think once you know the limitations and how to work around stuff with HTML/CSS then CP8 works pretty well.

[teamperform]

I've completed 10 courses using CP8 Responsive Design.  A bit clunky to be sure (as Captivate always seems to be), but the courses run very well on computers and Apple mobile devices in HTML5.  The only problem I have noticed is with sound.  On a few slides, the audio sounds like it is fading in for the first 20-30 seconds, then is OK, even though there is no fade in on the audio file.  The problem is inconsistent.  Anyone else experienced this?

[Stimpski]

Thanks RodWard‌ windscorpion‌ and teamperform‌ for your feedback and comments.

For the benefit of the ongoing discussion here are some of the problems I have. I have suffixed each item with static, responsive, html, swf, and IDE to try and give a little context.

• Arial text caption with variable causes font to change to serif in Internet Explorer and Firefox (static, swf) => doesn't happen with Verdana.
• Ordered and unordered lists not formatting correctly (responsive)
• First and second line leading different from second and subsequent lines (responsive)
• Unintended line returns appearing in outputted content where none exist in cptx file (responsive)
• Text rendered as canvas elements! (static, html)
• Canvas text often clipped bu parent div element (static, html)
• Inconsistent scrollbar positions on text entry boxes (swf,html)
• Shadows and reflections don't show up in published output (responsive)
• HTML slides use up a lot of memory (average of 64 MB for my 106 slide course) (static html, responsive)
• Buttons and links not working in HTML5 output on iPad (static, html output) => enabling then disabling mobile gestures could be solving this problem.
• Element smart positions (linked to master slide elements) breaking when editing master slides (responsive)
• Not being able to insert hyperlinks to multi-choice text (in question or feedback text) (static, responsive)
• Text on a slide occasionally disappearing on iPad (static, html)
• All keyboard shortcuts in IDE on Mac OS X 10.10 calls system alert (IDE)
• Can't enter soft returns in text captions (IDE)
• Can't get line returns out of editable text boxes (IDE)
• Can't pre-populate text entry box from a variable (IDE)
• Can't edit shared actions (IDE)
• Can't change between standard and conditional action types (IDE)
• Ungrouping group occasionally produces an error "Group_121 is either a reserved keyword or is already assigned to another item. Please provide a different name for the item." (IDE)
• Line and fill options occasionally disappear from properties panel (IDE)
• No margin options for standard buttons like retake quiz button, submit button, next button on multi-choice question slides (IDE)
• Can't set tab index of text entry boxes (IDE)
• Not all inspector dialog boxes visible with custom workspace (IDE)
• Corner radii unable to be specified in absolute units (e.g pixels) (IDE)
• Publishes seem to fundamentally break functionality that in previous publishes worked (IDE)
• Multi-choice question advanced answer option actions revert to Continue between saves of file (occasionally) (IDE)

[RodWard]

Some of these are indeed known issues (i.e. bugs). But many are are simply limitations of HTML5 output, and the rest are enhancements you may happen to want that have not as yet been built into Captivate because other enhancements were deemed more important.

How many of these issues have you logged with Adobe using their Bug Reporting page?

Feature Request/Bug Report Form‌

If you haven't as yet reported these individually as either bugs or enhancements, then I suggest you do so.  Adobe only acts on things that enough people ask for.

[windscorpion]

"Not being able to insert hyperlinks to multi-choice text (in question or feedback text)"

You can get around this by adding a text box (with the link) to the question slide

"Text on a slide occasionally disappearing on iPad"

Not noticed this myself but could it be due to the size of the text box so its being clipped if the text is being rendered differently?

[jay fresno]

Thank you for posting your findings. Does anyone know of other special characters, besides soft returns, that are not supported in Captivate?