Macromedia Captivate review

Even better, you can take advantage of the interactivity that Flash enables to add buttons and text-entry boxes to create quizzes. Or now you can use Captivate's Question Slide presets, which let you quickly set up multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank, true/false quizzes and so on. Most powerful of all is the ability to turn the demonstration itself into a test by adding clickboxes that must be clicked on correctly before you can progress, so that end users have to walk through the procedure themselves - not just sit back and watch it happen. And any quiz or test can be turned into an assessment, complete with SCORM/AICC compliance, for integration with learning management systems and direct integration with Macromedia's Breeze and Authorware. Alternatively, you can set up the automatic emailing of scores.

When you're ready to publish your finished project, again it could hardly be simpler. Macromedia has greatly improved the ability to output slides to Word documents (great for handouts), but of course the real secret of Captivate's success is its ability to output directly to Flash SWF format. And when you see the small file size of the end results (or inspect the streaming requirements in detail in the Bandwidth Profiler), you see yet another massive benefit of Captivate's overlaid animation approach compared to traditional video. And to make life even easier, Captivate lets you automatically upload the results to an FTP or Breeze server, or convert them to standalone Windows/Mac/Linux executables ready for emailing or burning to disc. You can also use the built-in MenuBuilder module to create an attractive front-end for your project.

Captivate has one final trick up its sleeve - you can now import Captivate CP files directly into Macromedia Flash MX 2004 for further editing. All objects from the playback controller to mouse path are added to their own layer, and you can use the timeline to move through your demonstration and see how it's built. It's a useful option to have, but when you see just how much is involved in creating the apparently effortless end illusion - a basic demonstration can involve complex manipulations of hundreds of separate bitmapped symbols - you really come to appreciate just how much work Captivate does behind the scenes.

Ultimately, Captivate's great strength is that it makes producing advanced software training and demos as simple in practice as it is in theory.

Author: Tom Arah