Product Reviews

For delivering online training, there's little to beat Adobe's Captivate, and this version builds on the success of its predecessor. Its strength lies in its web-friendly Flash SWF format, which can immediately be viewed by most PC users. That's helped hugely by intelligent screen capture, which avoids full-motion capture in favour of static frames automatically overlaid with mouse movements and local background changes such as keystrokes. It's this slide-based approach that makes it so bandwidth efficient for final delivery.

Editing improvements to this version include the ability to partially grey out the area surrounding a highlight box and to create a zoom effect. When adding objects, you can explicitly specify size and position, and choose to apply changed properties to the current object, slide or project. You can also quickly toggle the display and lock status of all elements in each slide's Timeline. The biggest productivity boost is the addition of a Library panel, which lists all sound and image files in the current project. This comes into its own when you want to reuse items, especially as you can open libraries from other project files.

Another major media-handling enhancement is support for Flash Video (FLV). Using the simple Insert dialog, you can browse to the FLV file you want to link to, set the desired width and height, and then select from a range of preset playback skins. The default FLV format supported is Progressive Download, which is simple to set up and can include alpha channels, so you can produce striking effects with transparent video overlays. Captivate also supports FLV hosting on streaming servers if you need improved handling or live video.

Captivate 2's new video support enables the program to move beyond traditional onscreen software demonstrations to new areas of computer-based training. The same is true of Captivate's support for interactivity. By adding click boxes and text-entry boxes, you can quickly turn a demonstration into a hands-on user assessment.

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Captivate 2 will even try to do this for you as you record, although you'll want to fine-tune the results.

Alternatively, using the Insert Question command, you can add quizzes to rate end user knowledge and customise the automatically generated feedback score page. Plus, to keep on top of such interactions, the Advanced Interaction dialog pulls together all questions and interactive objects in your project as an editable table and lets you control what should happen on success or failure, the number of attempts allowed and so on. You can also set whether answers should be reported to a behind-the-scenes Learning Management System (LMS), and Captivate 2 supports the major standards.

Captivate 2 aids user interaction by providing support for branching, letting each user follow their own path through the material provided. At its simplest, this can be managed by adding question slides, buttons and text and click boxes that lead to different target slides or load a URL, SWF or JavaScript snippet, depending on the response. To get you started with branching, Captivate 2 offers a Scenario wizard, which adds basic building block slides. To keep on top of more complex projects, it also offers a dedicated Branching view, showing colour-coded success and failure paths, providing a central point where you can quickly manage all branching links.

Once you've recorded your demonstrations and added your mark-up, external media and interactivity, you're ready to output your project. A major advance is the ability to print question-and-answer lessons and step-by-step guides as well as handouts. Along with the ability to add slide notes in the Storyboard, Editing and Branching views, this ensures your printed output is a useful part of the overall package.

Inevitably, though, it's the hands-on, Flash-based training that's Captivate's true publishing focus. Here, the biggest improvement is the ability to edit your playback skins. Alongside managing colour and appearance, you can set what controls should appear, including a Closed Captioning panel, which overlays a text version of audio, and a customisable drop-down menu that lets users jump between sections of the training. Editable skins are a big step forward, but could still be improved. However, if you really want to customise your output and are a Flash expert, you can export your project and playback controls to Flash 8 Professional.

Other packages, such as Wildform WildPresenter, offer simpler and cheaper routes to Flash-based computer-based training, but for maximum professional control Captivate is in a league of its own.