Based on the features included in Captivate 4, I am amazed at what Adobe is able to do in one release cycle. It seems like just yesterday Captivate 3 was released (along with the groans that came with that release).

While I’m sure there will be plenty of kinks/bugs to work out in Captivate 4 due to the sheer number of major changes/enhancements, it is definitely one step closer to being a real primary elearning development solution. Do I think it is the only tool that a professional elearning designer/developer should know how to use? No. In my opinion you still need to know flash/actionscript. But Captivate 4 is a HUGE upgrade over Captivate 3. It seems to me that, within a few more major releases, they could actually approach the capabilities of AuthorWare with this thing **(see below for my side-comments on AuthorWare).

And, both fortunately and unfortunately for me, I will lose a lot of my freelancing work/revenue once Captivate 4 is out in the wild.

Why? Becuase 90% of my Captivate-related freelance work (which was roughly 20% of my total freelance work) was focused on things like working with the variables, and also with creating custom UI wrappers/Menu systems to load in those bloated Captivate swf files. People would buy a license, slap together one long recording, publish, and then couldn’t figure out why their 300mb Captivate swf would crash and/or take a year to load. And then when they’d get wise and realize they needed to break up the long movie into smaller chunked swf’s, they’d learn that there was no way outside of Flash to create a usable UI that could load in all of these swf’s (unless you wanted pop-up windows galore). Allegedly Captivate 4 will have an aggregator function that finally allows people to create content in chunks and load them when needed (and don’t even comment on that garbage ‘MenuBuilder’ crap they’ve had). I also did a lot of work keeping data persistent across slides/CP swfs. CP4 has this capability built-in now.

But I’m kind of happy they added these features. I was up-to-my-ears with freelance work and with a new promotion at my day job I don’t need the extra work anymore. At least not boring Captivate work : )

Another feature that Camtasia has had forever (though they somehow managed to botch it up in the latest release!) and now CP4 will have is auto-panning for the recording. We can finally record large screens with and keep the clarity. If you’re not sure what auto-panning is want an idea of what auto-panning can do,  just check out Lee Brimelow’s awesome Flash tutorials over at gotoandlearn.com. He’s been using Camtasia for years to record those (and he still recommends Camtasia for screen recordings, even though he’s an Adobe employee…). I was at a conference a couple of years ago and an Adobe CP developer sat next to me and asked me what I’d like to see included in Captivate and I told him auto-panning. He was kind enough to send me an email after the conference saying that they looked into it but the resulting filesize would be too large so they scrapped the idea. I guess they revisited it.

Regardless of my cynical posts on Captivate over the years and today…honestly – my hats off to the Adobe Captivate developers on this release.

What do you think about these features? What else still sucks about the product?

** Re: AuthorWare: I got into the elearning development field about 6 years ago. At the time, it seemed that everyone knew, except for the die-hard Authorware fanboys, that Authorware was going to be ditched by Adobe (then Macromedia) soon. It took a few years longer than anticipated, but it happened. Back when I started I was fortunate enough to be told some good advice from some good elearning developers, mainly this: learn actionscript right away. Focus on flash. Forget about Authorware. I heeded their advice. I’m a  member of the Authorware ‘AWARE’ listserv (or whatever they call listservs nowadays). It’s still active and not at all focused on Authorware, which is good. Often though people still post questions asking for help/workaround for their new development using Authorware, which makes me cringe today more than it did 4 years ago : ) But, my be-labored point is – Authorware did rock. I never used it, but based on the features and capabilities of it, and the type of things that the folks on the AWARE list were/are able to do with it, I don’t see why Adobe ditched it and now are packing more advanced features into Captivate. Would have been better had they just kept it, updated it, and most impotantly made it *usable* by ditching the shitwave (er, I mean shockwave) plugin that made it unusable then and unusable now, and added an Authorware to SWF option. I know there are technical limitations there that would need to be contended with (Authorware had activeX capabilities), but they could have gotten real close. It just seems now that it will take another 4 or 5 releases but then we might get an Authorware equivalent in Captivate…

So when the boss told me to edit the Camtasia-produced modules, I initially thought, “Cool. I’ll finally get around to learning how Camtasia works beyond just ‘hit record, stop, and then save as an flv’. 

Well, I was wrong. Not quite. I now know all of Camtasia’s features. It only takes about 30 minutes to get intimately familiar with it if you are comfortable with timeline-based apps or any video editing software. The problem with Camtasia is editing is basically not possible. Yeah, you can split video files, slap ‘callouts’ (ie, graphics and text) over top of the videos, and a few other minor features, but that’s about it. And if, during recording, the recordee screws up, you can’t edit it. Not unless the recordee was kind enough to return their cursor/app to the exact spot they were at before screwing up, and then redid it correctly.

Camtasia is cool if you’re a one-person show and you need to quickly slap together powerpoint and/or video captures of your screen, and you’re fine with mistakes or the agony of not being able to edit. 

As much as I complain about Captivate, after spending some time with Camtasia, I have a newfound appreciation for it.

Yeah, the bloated BMP screen capture backgrounds, the transparent caption bug, the bloated filesize, and overall bugginess gets on my nerves. But at least I’m able to edit and maintain things that are created with it. Can’t say that about Camtasia.

Do you agree?