Welcome to Mastering Adobe Captivate 2017, Fourth Edition. Since its introduction in 2004, Captivate has been the leading solution for authoring interactive eLearning content. In the beginning, it was a very simple screen-capture utility called FlashCam. In 2002, a company named eHelp acquired FlashCam and turned it into a full-fledged eLearning authoring tool called RoboDemo. In 2004, another company called Macromedia acquired eHelp and changed the name of the product once again. Macromedia Captivate was born. A few months later, Adobe acquired Macromedia and, consequently, Macromedia Captivate became Adobe Captivate.
As the years passed, Adobe released Captivate 2, 3, and 4-adding tools, objects, and features along the way. One of the most significant events in the Captivate history took place in July 2010, when Adobe released Captivate 5. For that release, Adobe engineers rewrote the code of the application from the ground up. As a result, Captivate 5 was the first version to be available on both macOS and Windows. Version 6 was another milestone for Captivate as it was the first version to offer an HTML5 publishing option. More recently, version 8 has introduced the ability to create Responsive Projects, as well as a brand new user interface. A Responsive Project allows you, the eLearning developer, to automatically adjust the layout of your Captivate projects to fit the various screen sizes of tablet and smartphone devices. This makes mobile learning a whole lot easier and more powerful by creating content that looks perfect in different views.
At the time of writing this, the latest version of Captivate is called Captivate 2017. Captivate 2017 introduces many new features and enhancements, including an exciting new approach to responsive design called Fluid Boxes. Other new features introduced in Captivate 2017 include the integration of the Typekit font library, the ability to customize Closed Captions on a slide-to-slide basis, a redesigned Slide Notes panel, and tons of other enhancements.
With all this power only one click away, it is easy to overload your projects with lots of complex audiovisual effects and sophisticated interactions that can ultimately drive the learner away from the primary objective of every Captivate course: learning.
While working with Captivate, never forget that Captivate is an eLearning authoring tool. At the most basic level, it simply means that you, the developer, and your audience are united by a very special kind of relationship: a student-teacher relationship. Therefore, from now on-and for the rest of the book-you will not be called the developer or the programmer, but the teacher. The ones who will view your finished applications will not be the users or the visitors, but will be called the learners or the students. You will see that this changes everything.
In this chapter, you will:
- Discover the available options to install Captivate
- See the general steps of the Captivate production process
- Tour and customize the Captivate 2017 interface
- Work with panels and workspaces
- View the completed sample applications you will work with during the course of this book