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9
999kostya_plutenko
Participant
November 7, 2017
Question

Captivate is the worst software from Adobe I've ever tried.

  • November 7, 2017
  • 2 replies
  • 624 views

I've downloaded Captivate 2017 trial and installed it on two Macs:

2013 MacBook Pro i7 16 Gb ram - High Sierra

2015 iMac i5 24Gb ram - Sierra.

 

Things didn't work right from the start.
When downloading trial version with Safari on both computers download was stuck at nearly 100% but was never complete. I've tried 5 times to re-download. The only thing worked was to download using Chrome. I've never had this issue with any other website.

There might be more Mac users who will get the same problem.

 

Captivate runs very slow on Mac. To the point it's barely usable.

I didn't find any solution to this except seeing that there are others having same issue.

 


The most frustrating things I've encountered while using Captivate:

1) Project Preview didn't work on my MacBook with High Sierra. Doesn't matter whether it goes through local host in browser or SCORM cloud preview. In both cases package never loads but gets stuck on loading spinning wheel. Loading SCORM package through LMS, does work.

On my iMac running Sierra preview does work as well, but multi-slide synchronised videos don't play when published as SCORM package.

2) Tweaking slide length in Timeline felt broken.

I've added synchronised video and some buttons which will open different slides when pressed.

When I decided to increase duration of my slide button positions in the timeline started randomly and erratically shift. Even though I didn't touch them.

3) Software doesn't accept .mov files and opens media converter to convert files to mp4 which is fine, but sometimes files never get back into Captivate. They convert in media converter but inside Captivate progress bar is stuck animating forever.

4) Previewing in SCORM cloud doesn't work every second time. It says aborted by user even though I didn't press cancel or anything. It just fails to connect for some reason, but will do so ok on the next try.


Am I the only one who got so unlucky with first steps?
I can't really proceed with purchase if software is simply broken on my side.

Any advice appreciated. Unfortunately there are not many choices when it comes to authoring software, especially on Mac for some reason.

This topic has been closed for replies.

2 replies

9
999kostya_plutenkoAuthor
Participant
November 8, 2017

Just to clarify, I almost never had major issues running Photoshop, After Effects, Final Cut, Maya, Unity, Modo, etc. on any of my Macs.
In Photoshop some heavier files (>1 Gb) would require time to load and compute, however most of the time app was responsive.
In Captivate project with 1 slide performs like Photoshop which is applying 20 filters to a 50 layered 8K file.

I have recorded a 2 minute video, which hopefully will demonstrate what kind of performance I am facing and timeline nonsense as well.
Dropbox - Captivate.mp4

It's 7mb file, so please mind your traffic.
Also towards the end of the video I should what kind of processor, OS and ram amount I am using.

Lilybiri
Lilybiri
Legend
November 7, 2017

You can rant as much as you want, but this is a user forum (will not be allowed on all forums).

If you did read the release notes, you would have known that High Sierra was not mentioned as a compatible OS because it was released after the release of Captivate 2017. Did you try to contact Adobe for a hotfix, which the team probably already has prepared. They are much more firendly than Apple who doesn't care at all about all the applications they break with a new OS. Not only Captivate, but many other Adobe applications had issues with that OS.

Since I am a Windows user, who will never install a new OS without first checking if all my applications are compatible,  I cannot answer about the other issues. The fact that other eLearning tools don't offer a Mac version is pretty relevant to me as well, sorry.

    9
    999kostya_plutenkoAuthor
    Participant
    November 8, 2017

    Hey Lilybiri,
    I agree with your point about OS compatibility. High Sierra is fresh OS and it's understandable for software might have some incompatibilities. And the last thing I am interested is rant.

    Most of the time I've spent in Captivate under Sierra, which is supposed to be supported.

    Experience on both Macs was pretty much the same -  slow, unresponsive, broken.
    I would describe it like running software in some sort of software emulation mode or virtualised environment.

    I wanted to share my experience and see if problem is in my setup.
    However the more I read forums the more it seems that software is broken. And it has been like this for years. This is kind of a red flag for purchase decision.

    RodWard
    Community Expert
    RodWardCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    November 8, 2017

    Kostya,

    Captivate is not 'broken'. If it were, Adobe would be inundated with complaints and the few of us that answer questions on this forum would never be able to cope with the deluge.

    Please realise that if your only source of information about an application is its User Support Forum then it's easy to get the wrong impression because most people only go to such a forum when they are having problems.  That skews the statistics.

    The people represented on the forums are just a small fraction of the total user base. There are many thousands (perhaps hundreds of thousands) of users all over the world that are currently using Captivate successfully on both MAC and Windows platforms.

    That is not to say that users never experience issues with Captivate, or that Captivate is completely free of bugs.  That's why this User Forum exists and why the Community page has a Bug Reporting form.  But in my years of experience on this forum, the vast majority of 'issues' being reported here are due to users being unfamiliar with how Captivate works, or because they are attempting things that are beyond their current skill level and are seeking help from more experienced users like Lilybiri.

    You quite rightly ask the question as to whether your particular issue might be in your setup or with your OS.  New MAC OS versions seem to be especially prone to causing problems for Captivate, and wise Captivate users always choose to wait a few weeks AFTER a new OS (of any kind) is released before diving in.  This gives them the chance to allow OTHER less cautious users to have problems and log posts on the forums.  (Adobe usually responds fairly quickly with a patch if needed, but that could take weeks.)

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