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aejefferson
Participant
May 5, 2018
Question

Does Captivate require Flash to use as an authoring tool? It is listed as a system requirement. When will it be retired?

  • May 5, 2018
  • 2 replies
  • 2066 views

Does Captivate require Flash to use as an authoring tool?   It is listed as a system requirement.  When will it be retired from the desktop application?

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2 replies

Paul Wilson CTDP
Community Expert
Community Expert
May 5, 2018

There is always a period of transition when new systems are introduced. For example, when Apple transitioned from Mac OS 9 to OS X there was a period of time where Mac OS X would allow users to run their older Mac os 9 software on OS X. Of course, that was deprecated after a few versions of OS X, once Apple felt there was no longer any need to support the old applications.

 

Flash player is still around and in fact is still built into Google Chrome, although it is disabled by default. I would expect that Adobe Captivate will cease to include any support for flash sometime between now and the end of 2020 when Adobe will stop updating and distributing Flash Player.

 

https://theblog.adobe.com/adobe-flash-update/

Paul Wilson, CTDP
aejefferson
Participant
May 7, 2018

Thanks for your quick response.  I am attempting to verify if Captivate 9 or 2017  will run on Windows 7/10 without Flash. The following is listed as a system required .

  • Adobe Flash Player 10 (or more) for viewing multimedia content

Will Captivate launch on a desktop without  Flash?

RodWard
Community Expert
Community Expert
May 7, 2018

One thing you DO need to be aware of is that when you install Captivate, it does install a Flash Player that it would normally use for its default Preview method. It would also (by default) try to install the Quiz Results Analyzer and the Adobe Captivate Reviewer which are both actually Adobe AIR apps.

If your system blocks any installation of Flash Player or Flash technology (such as AIR) then you may find that Captivate will not install.  You can easily test this with a trial version of Captivate.  See if that will install successfully before making any purchase.

This would also help you to see that if you are only ever going to built HTML5 output, you would probably never be using the normal Preview method that relies on Flash anyway.

Lilybiri
Legend
May 5, 2018

You can perfectly use Captivate without Flash player (which isnot the same as the appkication Flash builder which now is named Animate CC). Some features are not available for HTML output (see Project, HTML Tracker). Some of the Preview methods for a non-responsive project use temporary SWF output, but Preview HTML in Browser not.

Do not forget that there are still quite a lot of SWF's around in the eLearning world, that many companies are stuck with old browsers that do not support HTML. You cannot require that Adobe just takes out the SWF possibility in Captivate, because the Flash Player is still active and used more than you seem to think.

aejefferson
Participant
May 7, 2018

Thank you! This is very helpful!