Macromedia Captivate

List Price: $499.99

Features:

• Macromedia Captivate (formerly RoboDemo) automatically records all onscreen actions and instantly creates an interactive Flash simulation.
• Point and click to add text captions, narration, and e-learning interactions without any programming knowledge.
• Smart Full-Motion Recording and Visual Timeline in Edit View.
• Macromedia Flash MX 2004 Export capabilities.

Customer Reviews:

Buy it, you'll love it.  [Posted on 2005-07-04]
What is the single best thing about Macromedia's Captivate?

It's incredibly easy to use!

Ever use easy to master PowerPoint to get your point across?

After playing around with PowerPoint for an hour or two you were creating cool slide presentations that you were proud of in no time, right?

Like PowerPoint you are up and running in Captivate (formerly RoboDemo) in a matter of minutes, creating computer / web based demonstrations, simulations and training that can be delivered on computers and also exported to: CD, DVD, movies attached to emails, FTP directly to a web site, compressed as a zip file, and best of all, the final Captivate movies can be stand alone Flash movies that can be viewed on Macs, as well as Window's PC!

You can even import your movies directly into Macromedia's Flash as well as include them in Macromedia's fantastic "Breeze" presentation tool.

In many other ways Captivate again is also very similar and as simple to use as PowerPoint - it uses the same "slide" type outlines (called storyboards) and super easy navigation through your slides to make changes to them (edit view), but Captivate adds several very cool additional layers to this mix: an easy to use timeline, live recording of your every click of the mouse, every drag and drop you make, window's opening and closing, automatic caption insertion, your very own voice narration in perfect sync with your every mouse movement, and one of my favorite things in the program, a terrific and easy way to import / export audio sound tracks and background music, and if you make a mistake, a no-brainer way to fix your audio mistakes on-the-fly.

And thankfully, there is no coding!

Unlike some of the other powerful Macromedia tools like Flash, Director, Cold Fusion, and aspects of Dreamweaver, you don't have to be a programmer to do some very powerful things in Captivate including creating e -Learning test, surveys and quizzes - perfect for trainers and educators at all levels.

I am a professional software trainer and to be honest in this review, years ago I once worked for Macromedia as a trainer.
Regardless, I have always pointed out to people at Macromedia that some of the company's tools have steep and complex learning curves and they should create tools that are powerful, but also "easy to master" for people like me who don't "get" coding, nor has the time to learn complex and overwhelming software tools.

Having taught tens of thousands of people complex software tools "live" in traditional computer lab classrooms, during public seminars, and at major computer / web conferences and tradeshows, Captivate is a God send for someone like me.

I will point out one major thing Macromedia did wrong in regards to Captivate; however, Macromedia's marketing team has forgotten to tell people how much "fun" it is to use!

With Captivate, Macromedia did it right. It's powerful as heck, "and" simple to use - the very best of both worlds.

Buy it, you'll love it.

Richard John Jenkins

Gets the job done easily and efficiently [Posted on 2005-08-03]
You can hardly go wrong when you're dealing with a Macromedia product. We needed something that would allow our tester to be able to create walkthroughs of our software without having to worry about Flash programming. This made it easy.

Lives up to its promises! [Posted on 2005-09-03]
Software that does what it promises - every time -- all the time! Relief!

Captivate makes set-up easy, puts all sorts of call-outs at your fingertips, and at least for me, does not crash. Wow!

I spent a full week attempting to get Camtasia to do what it promises, but I was plagued with crashes -- and not just garden-variety crashes, but crashes that corrupted all the work I'd already done.

Not the case with Captivate! I put in the images, set the call-outs, added music, and Voila!
[...]
I'm now one happy camper. Five Stars and then some!

Phyllis Staff, Ph.D.
author, "How to Find Great Senior Housing"
and
"128 Ways to Prevent Alzheimer's and Other Dementias"

Good product but not for the Web, not yet. [Posted on 2005-12-31]
If you are going to use Captivate for non-web applications, like standalone .EXE files and such, buy it. You probably won't find any better alternative on the market.
But if you want to export your project to Web, you have to consider following before buy:
1. Not compatible with Flash v8. You have to copy and paste some dll files, and import the captivate file into the Flash 8. Still it won't import the mouse movements. So you have to do all tween motions manually.

2. Creates huge .swf files, mostly unusable for web. Example: Tried a web application demo, consists 6 steps. Captivate created 44 frames. When I import into Flash and export as swf, it turned out 4MB in size with over 8000 frames. Even if I can be able to reduce the size by half, it will still be 2MB with very low quality blurry images.
I had alot better results with capturing the each screen with FireWorks, and edit them in Flash 8.

Just my 2 cents.

Excellent product with some pluses [Posted on 2006-04-12]
I had no experience with Captivate (or Flash/Dreamweaver/any other Macromedia product) when I began using it to produce some training movies, and was nonethless able to get up and running, and do productive work very rapidly. Macromedia has great docs and some wonderful tutorials/helps on their web site which also helped. But the program itself is intuitive and pretty simple to use (at least compared to others that I've experienced in the past).

One very pleasant surprise I've learned is that you can do a great deal of editing to captured slides, without having to recapture another session. You can cut and paste other graphics onto your slides, and even merge them into the background, to permanently cover up certain artifacts and blurps that you'd rather not let the user see.

The program also automatically highlights buttons and text boxes that you might select and use during the capture session, which saves you the time of having to create those yourself. The program also lets you configure a great number of options -- it takes a little effort to learn them all, but doing so can save a great deal of time as well.

NOTE: The only reason I gave this 4 stars instead of 5 is that I've experienced a few crashes when trying to publish movies. Happily, everything is still saved, and the movie does get successfully published, but the program just ups and dies without any error messages. (It seems to happen when I put links in to other movies, but that's just a guess right now.) So while it's a fatal error, at least you don't lose any work, and you can restart Captivate just fine afterwards without any problems. Nonetheless, it shouldn't happen.

And now that I think of it, every so often the program seems to get confused when you're doing a lot of scrolling and other motion/screen changes, and a slide shows the previous slide's background instead of the new one. This is rare, though, and can be easily fixed by going to a slide with the right background, copying that, and pasting it as the new background on the incorrect slide. So it's an inconvenience, but easily fixed.

Neither of these problems are really serious and I'd expect them to be fixed with the next major release. (I'm using release 1.01, by the way.)

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