Captivate on the iPad

Hi All

Well I am posting this request on 28 Nov 2014 and it is interesting to see the progression of issues over the past few years. I have just undertake Captivate 8 training and deployed my first few Captivate lesson on our University Learning Management System Blackboard. While all looked great in Captivate I have found many issues that are a problem for me as someone trying to deploy mobile and blended learning applications to students at our University.

So far the only browser that will play my captivate without any play issues is Safari. Chrome loses some navigation functionality. It won't play on Firefox at all, and it requires internet explorer 9 but again some features don't function as designed.

My biggest question however is this: I understood that if I added movies in MP4 to Captivate 8 and the output was HTML 5 that movies would play on an IPAD. My current project will not play movies on an IPAD. Is this an issues anyone else has discovered? Can anyone advise a solution or refer me to a fix for this?

I also cannot get Captivate 8 to play on Blackboard Mobile? Anyone else had this issue....any solutions?

Thanks in advance,

Ian Boyle

Blended Learning

University of Western Sydney.

Hi all,

I am doing some R&D activities with the Captivate to HTML5 conversion tool in my ipad.

well the result is ok but not upto the mark.

1. The loading of the media files are very slow.(audio, image etc)
2. Performance is not good, very slow
3. Audio has some errors, some times it loads fine and some times not
4. demo size is not automatically fitting the device screen size
5. when i export the captivate with the left side navigation panel, the main content area is not show perfectly in the right side
6. audio sync is not supporting, only the audio plays with out sync with the animation
7. Mouse movement is starting from the starting of each of the slide.

Hope thees issues will be fixed in the next version of the html5 conversion tool

Thanks

Siba

Can anyone point me in the right direction please...

My understanding is that Adobe Captivate sims CAN now be played on ipads as an iOS application (but NOT in the iOS browser itself)

Am I right in assuming that the process now would be to

1.Create a Captivate project and publish as a a SWF

2.Import the SWF into Flash CS5 Pro

3.Publish the SWF in the iphone packager (inside of flash CS5 Pro)

4.Then you would have an ipa file which would be uploaded into iTunes

Is this correct?

Does anyone know of any tutorials using Flash CS5 Pro and the iphone packager using a Captivate file?

Thanks

Mike

We recently got an iPad at work and I've been playing with it and Captivate 5.  As others have accurately posted, it is possible to create a demonstration only and publish it as an .f4v file.  I then used Adobe Media Encoder to convert that to an h.264 .mp4 file.  The iPad will play this mp4 file using the Safari browser just fine.  It looks and sounds great.

My concerns are that there is no interactivity at all.  And no closed captioning nor TOC either.

Mister C.

If I may, I think the executive summary for the Captivate on Apple mobile devices issue is:

1. Apple has banned Flash from their mobile products (iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch), so you cannot use projects published directly from Captivate.
2. Apple has banned the ability to use Adobe Packager for iPhone to convert Adobe-generated content to an iPhone-native format (link), so no hope there.
   
3. Adobe has partnered with Greystripe to create a service for converting Flash to HTML 5 on the fly (link), but it's only just been announced and is intended to deliver interactive ads; there's no guarantee it will work for Captivate-published projects.  It's also a hosted solution, so you'll be paying Greystripe a monthly fee for the service if it works for Captivate projects at all.
4. You can convert a published Captivate project to a video format (.avi, .m4v, etc.) but doing so means it's a view-only demo with no interactivity.  This conversion must be done using a 3rd-party tool each time you republish your Captivate project.
   
5. The differing screen sizes of the iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch means you will likely end up targeting each published project to a specific screen size (iPad vs iPhone 3/iPad Touch vs iPhone 4) or settling for a lowest-common-denominator screen size (iPhone 3/iPod Touch).
   
6. The differing screen dimensions of the Apple mobile products makes reusing project resources very difficult; some content that looks great on iPad will be unreadable at smaller screen sizes (iPhone 3/ iPod Touch).

Basically, until Adobe forces Apple to open up the iOS through legal means or Adobe adds HTML 5 support to Captivate, the ability to use Captivate-generated content on Apple mobile devices is limited to publishing your projects and converting them as view-only videos.

If there's anything I missed, feel free to chime in. 

Regards,

John

I don't know how you managed to miss out on the last few months worth of Apple, Adobe, and Google power struggles. But, here's the deal: no Flash on Apple devices: http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/

For public-consumption, demonstration-only screencasts, that's not much of a big deal. Cp5 will export to the YouTube-friendly f4v format. YouTube will transcode that as Apple-friendly h.264 behind the scenes. For similar stuff that can't be put on YouTube, you can export from Captivate to AVI and use a converter like FFMPEG or Handbrake to convert to h.264. 

Another option will be HTML5 and its Canvas element, emerging standards that Adobe's authoring tools will, I suspect, eventually support. There are already some experimental converters out there (e.g. http://smokescreen.us/) which will convert SWF to HTML5 + JavaScript. The HTML5 option would provide a lot more opportunities for interactivity. And I think that Adobe could totally own this space, as the creator of HTML5 development tools, if they chose to do so. But we'll see how that shakes out.

[I think Apple has some legitimate as well as some perfectly selfish and self-serving reasons for banning Flash from its devices. But I'll refrain from diving into that for now. I'm a fan of both Apple and Adobe, which makes me something of an odd bird of late.]

Practically speaking, this has been a non-issue for my own screencast delivery. The consumers of the screencasts I create consume them via desktop, laptop, and netbook machines. Many people in my organization have iPhones and iPod touch devices. And quite a few have Macs (especially at home, as I do). But, as yet, there's been no strong desire to access training content via those devices. As Rick noted, the form-factor itself is an issue. The iPad (and, as they emerge, other larger-format touch devices) will be a more viable platform for delivering screencasts, but I'm still not sure that the typical usecase for these devices will be to consume training content. If trainees come beating down my door demanding to watch my SharePoint and Excel how-to demos and simulations on their iPads, I'll find a way to target them. But, for now, it's not a concern. 

If --coming-- Flash 5 can convert to Apple's native format and if there's a smooth workflow integration between Captivate and Flash 5, --better yet, publish straight to Apple's format from within Captivate-- then Bob's your uncle.

p.s: no plans to buy an iPad.

Cheers,

Seth

Hi Erika

My guess here is the answer is a big NO.

When the iPad first was announced I saw lots of chatter among assorted Adobe folks as well as other Community Professionals. As I understand it, Apple totally rejects Flash. Therefore the iPad doesn't support Flash. Captivate outputs to Flash ergo no Captivate (or anything that requires Flash) on the iPad.

For me, I see iPad as just another silly move on Apple's behalf to lock out the mainstream. They have traditionally prevented any cloning of components and have kept prices artificially high as a result. Which is why PCs dominated the marketplace. You can usually buy about four PCs for what you pay for a single Apple.

Cheers... Rick