MacDirectory Magazine

FEA TURE REVIEW ADOBE’S ELEARNING SUITE 2 LEARNS TO LIVE ON THE MAC WORDS BY RIC GETTER FThere once was a time when “platform parity” at Adobe meant Windows users having to wait for their version of the company’s flagship applications to be released. Now, more often than not, it’s the Mac community waiting to catch up. With Adobe’s release of Captivate 5and the eLearning Suite 2, we’ve just gotten closer. For instructional designers yearning to migrate to the Mac, it’s been a long wait for what is one of the industry’s most comprehensive courseware development systems to make the move. For Mac shops already working in Flash, multimedia and web development, it opens up some interesting opportunities. Captivate 5 has come a long way since its release (as eHelp’s RoboDemo) in 2002 when it was little more than a screen recording application. Brought into Adobe’s fold as part of the Macromedia acquisition, it’s now the centerpiece of a suite that includes Flash Professional, Dreamweaver, Photoshop CS5 Extended, Acrobat Proand Soundbooth and a host of online services. Version 5, according to Adobe, is a ground-up rewrite of the application. Based on the “new” (for Windows users) features, it represents a major improvement centered around a much more Adobe-like interface. The nature of the other improvements seem, compared to most of Adobe’s products, bring it to a level to where the program would start to live up to a typical Mac user’s expectations. What is Captivate, Anyway? Captivate’s capabilities go far beyond its screencasting roots. Comparing it with the far less expensive entries like Telestream’s excellent ScreenFlowand TechSmith’s long-awaited Camtasia for Mac(both priced at $99) would be a little like comparing TextEditto Pages or Word. There are several orders of magnitude of difference in the programs’ levels of complexity and capabilities. Captivate is a fully interactive environment with tools for complex branching, scripting as well as building in tests and assessments that meet accreditation standards that have been set for many forms of professional training. If this is your first experience with Captivate, you should plan on spending some time dealing with the program’s rather substantial learning curve. It is not as much of a challenge to master as Flash, but it gets very deep very quickly thanks to its versatility and the rather unique way it approaches the tasks it does. Even though we tend to think of slide presentations as linear, Captivate sessions can branch based on user input. For example, presentations can be designed so the viewer can choose to drill deeper for more background information or an incorrect response can send them into another section for remediation. Fortunately, the program comes with an well-written user guide, Adobe AIR-based help system and we should expect further training opportunities from Adobe Press and other publishers. Though now more Adobe-like, the work area is still rather unique thanks, in part, to the program’s unique workflow. At the center is the stage, representing the current slide, flanked on the left by the toolbar and a PowerPoint-like filmstrip of slides and a collection of properties panels on the left. Beneath the stage is a timeline to fine-tune the activity on the current slide. More Than a Screen Grab When Captivate’s precursor appeared in 2002, there simply wasn’t the hardware power or software sophistication to allow for lengthy, full motion video screen captures, so the developers came up with a way of making do with single screen grabs and animated overlays for cursors, captions and callouts. It was and remains a very efficient way getting the job done with a minimum of overhead during either production or playback. The program now offers full motion video recording, but you may be surprised to discover how infrequently it’s actually needed. Each screen-change becomes a new slide in the filmstrip. The program captures every user action with a callout. You can also zoom into an area of a screen, but this only appears to work when you’re dealing with animated screens rather than full screen recording. MacDirectory 125

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