Customer Reviews

Adobe Captivate 4 [OLD VERSION]

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I have been using this program full time since Aug 2009 developing thousands of slides, on numerous topics. The following is my ongoing journal. I foresee using this program for several more months before the product cycle ends...

Pros
1. Capturing a procedure is done fairly well. See item 12 below in the cons section. However, the output leaves a lot to be desired. If your presentation has a certain look and feel that you would like to match the raw capture is going to require editing - a lot of editing.

2. The on-board quiz/test generator is very easy to use and links to an LMS if one is setup to accept the data.

3. Setting up conditionals in the program for data-gathering and program manipulation is easy (provided you know what variables you would like to use and have a clear understanding of if...then statements).

4. Importing audio is easy. However, it must be edited and its final form before importing it to captivate. See items 7 and 19 in the cons section.

5. Rescaling of a project from one dimension to another, i.e. 800*600 to 1024*768 is very successful without distorting or compensating aspect ratio for the objects contained within.

6. The animation option is useful with the standard animations available, but they are limited and rather generic looking. Without an animation tool for creating/editing animations this feature is somewhat useful but limited in its applicability.

7. The ability to export the output in several output formats is a plus. However, the usefulness of these formats is condition specific.

Cons
1. Captivate is operationally difficult to use.

2. Sometimes Captivate will not publish html/swf files with file names (title) exceeding more than a few characters - behavior is inconsistent. No Adobe documentation on file naming exists within the product manual or help files.

3. Over all object positioning and alignment in the development window is tedious. After custom alignment has been performed objects may move without prompt. Causes a great deal of rework.

4. Button object alignment using the text button feature appears normal in the development file but "may" be disjointed in the published version. Auto-align does not necessarily fix it.

5. Sometime hyperlinks to external files from within an .exe fail - inconsistent.

6. Sometimes hyperlinks revert to default file locations.

7. Open File or URL feature - This feature does not work as advertised. Sometimes designators to another file/url that are supposed to open in the current window fail. The current program just stalls and no action takes place. The only method I have been able to count on consistently is to designate that the file be opened in a new browser.

8. "Text to Speech" feature is to robotic sounding for final audio production.

9. The audio editing capabilities of Captivate are too rudimentary for audio editing.

10. Object orientation is limited to upright - no rotating of objects within the development environment.

11. Presentation Slide audio only appears on one time line. Additional audio must be created, removed, and reattached to other objects on the page if the audio is to be associated to an object event and not to timeline position.

12. The default TOC feature is clumsy unless you anchor it to a specific position.

13. Captured procedures require a great deal of editing and timing adjustment to be useful mid-stream in a presentation. Not as straight-forward as advertised.

14. Users must wait for captivate generated html pages (final output) to fully load before clicking any object of the page will stall and must be reloaded.

15. The global setting feature is great, unless you apply it.

16. The lock slide/object feature is slow to respond if using more than a few objects (20 or more) on a slide.

17. Roll-Over images, Roll-Over text, and the zoom area features are difficult to manage once more than a few instances are needed.

18. The over-all limit to 45-50 slides per presentation is a serious limitation for developing complex topics. Exceeding this causes many performance issues during and after development. Development file size that exceeds a few megabytes seems to cause the program to behave inconsistently. Source files are prone to crashing, and are generally unrecoverable.

19. Sometimes (often) saving a file fails but the program doesn't crash, it just closes. The Adobe Connect Pro user community recommends copying the slides to another file and save the new file.

20. Audio elements or queues sometimes have an inordinate amount of pops, static and clicks.

21. Hyper linking to files outside of a captivate file does not guarantee navigation back to the original file, and does not guarantee that the file will return to the last page viewed from the hyper-linked page.

22. The in-development review feature doesn't really show all the elements of a slide as it is intended. Review requires fully loading one of the simulated options or actually publishing the file to see if it functions as expected.

23. The Flash video option is useless without a flash generator/editing program to support it.

24. Sometimes, zooming into a slide when editing will render the file unusable.

25. Sometimes slide objects become unusable and must be replaced. If a slide object cannot be deleted the slide must be completely recreated.

26. Slide editing becomes increasingly sluggish as numerous elements are added to the slide.

27. Once an object has been created it may not be editable. Sometimes an object will accept a modification of settings, but not reflect those changes in the working or final version.

28. Font scripts in some text boxes are cut off by two or three pixels. The phenomenon seems to be largely absent if a text box is created and not adjusted for font size, color, or position. Of course there are adjustments for each of these properties and not being able to customize the properties without causing a flaw in the final product is in contradiction to the very existence of the property adjustment!

29. Button pause features do not necessarily pause slide audio!

30. Scripts and variables for custom interactions are very difficult to use. The scripting dialogue is inadequate, it does not behave predictably, and there is very little documentation on the topic available from either adobe or the public domain. Without this feature, complex navigation feedback is impossible.

31. The program locks up quite often. No matter whether you save often or not, just a few minutes of work in captivate is a lot of lost work. So, unless you're in the habit of saving after every single action you have performed, you will lose some work every time you use captivate.

32. When using the preview feature (F8) the program will occasionally stall. It's a waiting game. The program may restart after a few minutes (6-10) if you're lucky. This behavior is inconsistent. Wednesday Jan 6th around 9AM, program locked up for 15 minutes when running a preview. The same file had been being used for preview without any disruption in process prior to the malfunction. Same file acted normally until Friday the 8th when the program locked up again on a different file. This event started at 8:45AM. The condition is maintaining itself at 9:08AM. Program is now active again at 9:10 AM. Using the preview feature again at 10:05 AM. The program has stalled and is still inactive at 10:14 AM. At 10:18 AM the program is still inactive. At 10:24 AM the program is still inactive. At 10:30 AM the program is still inactive. At 10:35 AM the program is still inactive. At 10:41 the program is still inactive. Program cleared and started responding again at 10:46 AM. Tuesday, January 12, 2009: I started the F8 preview three times this morning and each of the two first times the preview opened, functioned normally and closed. I initiated a third time at 9:05 AM and it has stalled taking my system hostage for the last 18 minutes. The program released itself at 9:24 AM.

33. When adding an image to a slidelet the first attempt at configuring the new image in the slide may appear fuzzy or out of focus in the development window and the final output after publishing. Usually redoing the image add work will clear up the focus. While this isn't usually a crisis, it does require that the developer do the same task twice on a regular basis.

34. File/slide progress can be stilted from a non-identifiable cause. After developing numerous slides with similar elements one slide started pausing after .1 seconds, and remained in this mode for the entire progress of the slide. Nothing I could find with any single element of the slide had the property to allow for this type of behavior. The only way to get the slide to progress was to continually click the play button. It was possible to skip the slide by forcing advance using the customized buttons, but the only way to see the entire contents in the timeline for the slide was in .1 second increments - like watching a film one frame at a time. Resolution: created a whole new blank file, imported all existing slides and objects from offending file into new blank file. Problem solved...

35. Linking programs together is problematic. When developing a project I had decided to use the linking feature that would allow the end of one file to prompt the opening of another. But somewhere in the development process the feature stopped working - yes at one time it worked flawlessly. Now none of the files will automatically open another file at the end of the presentation. This is another example of how unstable this program is.

36. New phenomena as of today - 02/02/2010 - Unable to copy and paste an element of one slide to another. Specifically, I have a button used to continue the slide show which is associated with a animated text that flashes the word continue in red before the button appears. There is audio embedded to each piece. The first is an electronic clinking sound and the second is a female voice speaking the word continue. I have been using this set of objects in every slide, in every show for months now. Today, suddenly, I cannot copy the group of objects from one slide to another. Each time I attempt it the program crashes and looses all my changes after the last save. I have attempted this maneuver six or seven times reproducing the same results each time. As a test, I copied the object from the same source and pasted it into a new blank slide... worked perfectly. Apparently I have reached the upper limit of objects or slides or something like that for this particular file.

37. The global setting feature associated with the object setting dialogue box does not always work as anticipated or advertised. Applying global settings to an object such as a text box or illustration are problematic. Sometimes the settings do not apply. Other times the setting which has a choice between setting all properties or only changed properties does not follow through. This feature also may apply to a great deal of other objects that are defined as "the same" when the actual properties that make them the same are not always differentiated by file object. In other words, applying a global setting to a text box located at X coordinate and Y coordinate with unique height and width dimensions may also apply to all other text boxes present in the entire presentation or slide. The application may adversely affect an entire presentation.

As an embellishment to the previous item - I wonder if someone who reads this might think I am possibly doing something wrong. Am I not copying and pasting correctly (?), not selecting the objects correctly (?), not targeting the destination correctly (?), not able to understand the program (?), unable to comprehend the process (?). To this my response is, "you're right, I am too incompetent to perform an action like this such as I have done thousands of times before, within dozens of different programs, on hundreds of different computers and within this same file and on this same computer, within this same program thousands of times.

Captivate 4 from Adobe is software to author professional eLearning multimedia modules or, at a simpler level, to create demonstrations. Programming or multimedia development experience is not required to create Captivate 4 presentations, although many of the powerful new features in version 4 benefit from the involvement of a programmer or individual who knows how to use Flash and PhotoShop CS4.

Captivate 4 is the cornerstone product of the e-Learning Suite, ten bundled Adobe software products, offering an e-Learning team tight product integration. Beyond Captivate, the suite includes:

Flash CS4. [A specially enhanced version with templates for quizzing]
Presenter 7. [Enhances PowerPoint with high-impact Flash presentations, Captivate 4 content, and voiceovers]
Dreamweaver CS4. [Includes enhanced course interactions and HTML with increased functionality]
PhotoShop CS4 Extended. [Supports layered images for import to Captivate]
Acrobat 9 Professional. [Embeds Captivate projects as Flash run time files]
Soundbooth CS4. [Facilitates creating and polishing audio, customizing music, and adding sound effects. Captivate 4 audio links to Soundbooth for audio editing]
Device Central CS4. [Enables development of Captivate projects for mobile platforms]
Bridge CS4. [Manages media so you can organize, browse, locate, and view creative assets]
Media Encoder [Converts Flash and other media for live and on-demand delivery]

This review was written using the e-Learning Suite.

Before exploring the power of Captivate 4, here's a quick summary of how Captivate works in general.

Perhaps you want to teach someone how to create a new folder in Microsoft Outlook. Once you've planned your lesson, you open Outlook to the initial lesson screen. Then, in Captivate, you set up a recording simulation. Back in Outlook, the Captivate recording window captures an image of every window and each task you perform. It documents each mouse click, text entry, or button click. When you're finished, the software renders a set of slides, each displayed in Captivate in a PowerPoint-like interface. When you first preview the project, you'll see the workflow and tasks you performed, such as mouse or button clicks, and captions such as "Select the File menu option". You can and edit and enhance the appearance and interactions to your heart's content; just about every event is customizable.

Each slide's events are displayed in on a timeline so you can tweak the delivery timing, characteristics, and relationships. When your project is published, it is rendered automatically to an Adobe Flash [SWF] file as a professional learning or demonstration presentation, ready for use. Now let's take a tour of the many new features in Adobe Captivate 4.

Roundtrip PowerPoint Workflow
In addition to recording an application as described above, you can also bring an existing PowerPoint 2007 presentation from a subject matter expert [SME] into Captivate, including audio and interactivity. The slides can be edited using PowerPoint right inside Captivate. Using Microsoft object linking and embedding [OLE] technology, they can link directly back to PowerPoint. Many, but not all special PowerPoint effects are supported. And if the PowerPoint source file is changed by your SME, you can simply update your Captivate project.

I imported an existing sales presentation in Captivate, and using a new drop-down to open PowerPoint, added a new picture. The saved file was updated both in Captivate 4 and PowerPoint. You can use the Captivate Library to manage all of your PowerPoint 2007 linked files. And if your SME doesn't have PowerPoint, you can embed the PowerPoint file completely into Captivate. Older PowerPoint versions are supported for importing, but not for linking.

Streamlined Workflows and Enhanced Usability
Version 4 sports many intuitive use enhancements. A new recording workflow provides all recording mode options in a button bar tucked into the corner of the recording window. You can work with application regions that place a floating recording window on screen as it discovers a region. And if you capture an application in full motion mode, regions offer the flexibility to manipulate each slide that is produced.

Text captions can now be edited directly on-screen, a big time saver, and right mouse clicks are finally supported during recording. A new drawing toolbar lets you add and modify the effects of simple shapes. Menu bar options have been reorganized to support more logical groups of functions, and many options have been shifted to the Preferences dialog.

Panning
Panning is a new feature that allows the Captivate recording window stay with the mouse as it moves around the screen. It's also useful if your application size exceeds a smaller capture area. You can pan manually, moving the recording window as you go, or automatically, so the window moves as you work. I got better results with automatic panning, letting the capture window follow me around as I worked.

Text to Speech
Many Captivate developers use a professional speaker for project narration, but that adds cost to a project. Narration of captions is necessary to comply with federal section 508 accessibility standards for government and some public projects, so the ability to add text to speech capability is timely. Two voices, Paul and Kate are provided. You display your slide notes at the bottom of a slide, type the text you want to convert to speech, and click a "Convert text to speech" button. The created wave file can be used as is, or edited through the Soundbooth interface. Both Paul and Kate's voices were understandable, though I preferred the sound of Paul.

Project Templates
Templates allow you to create placeholders to control properties and options such as the duration of a video added by your SME. I chose "Create New Design Template"; a project opened with slides containing text captions, standard buttons, success and failure text for user actions, mouse movement, and quiz handling objects. Each was fully modifiable, as were customized skin choices for screen appearance and playback progress and the table of contents. Then, selecting the template from the template panel, Captivate quickly applied its properties to each of my test project's slides.
Your SME simply double-clicks a placeholder and adds the content; you get to manage the rest of the visual and auditory show.

The Table of Contents and Aggregator Feature
The new multi-level table of contents generator is a major improvement over the old menu builder feature. You simply click a "show" setting in the TOC tab of the skin editor, and a table of contents displays. It took only a few clicks to specify a custom skin appearance. Your user can now select which topic to learn, and sees a checkmark as it's completed.

The Aggregator is like a super table of contents, compiling multiple projects into a complete eLearning course. It lets you add published SWF project files, and then displays each published project in order.

I aggregated several of my published projects. It's similar to publishing a single project, but you can add, promote and demote files, suppress the SWF file names, and change your TOC settings. Captivate creates one resulting SWF or EXE file with a consolidated table of contents. If you later find you need to modify one of your files, you can edit and re-publish it, and then repeat the aggregation. Aggregation makes it easy to assign out related projects to multiple developers.

SWF Commenting Using Adobe AIR
Colleagues can easily review a project using the new SWF commenting feature with Adobe AIR, a free application that runs outside the browser and on multiple operating systems. When publishing a project, you select Review, and specify a location for the reviewed CREV file. You can include an explanatory email message.

Reviewers can add a comment using the comment toolbar; it's automatically added to a central XML file. Ellipses help pinpoint comments on a progress bar, and a filter option controls who should see what comments. In a networked setting, all reviewers can see all comments in a shared folder.

SWF Commenting -- Send for Review -- was easy to use without using the Help files. The time-stamped comments and the ability to see all input at once are worthwhile. Importantly, your reviewer need not have Captivate to participate, and no longer has to be a Windows user.

Adobe Photoshop Layer Support
If you have layered images in Photoshop, they can be imported into Captivate, layered or flattened. I opted to add all of the layers in my test PhotoShop file and Captivate created one slide with selectable image objects for copying or editing using Properties -- or the timeline. Layers can also be merged into a background file in Captivate, protecting them from accidental object handling.

Variables and Advanced Actions
A variable is a symbolic name associated with a value that can be changed. Variables help provide consistency across projects, saving you from re-entering redundant information, and allowing customizations for a user. Captivate 4 supports user-defined variables that you create to fit specific project needs -- and system variables, created by Adobe developers to manage events, slide-specific information, quizzing, or computer system data.

User-defined variables handle tasks such as: printing the name of a course, collecting and displaying the learner's name, providing learner reinforcement, or showing the number of screens viewed in the course. Using the Actions dialog in the Project menu bar option, I created a user defined variable to capture the learner's name, typed in a text entry box at run time, and then output the results on a screen to personally thank the leaner for completing the course.

All system variable descriptions [for example, CpCmdShowPlaybar] are available by choosing Project, then Actions, and selecting a variable. Use of system variables is an advanced feature that assumes some programming knowledge. Advanced actions also allow the use of scripting language to handle complex and condition-based interaction scenarios, tasks best meant for programmers.

Customizable Widgets
Widgets are configurable ActionScript-based Flash objects that can quickly provide customized interactivity and rich content. Static widgets are non-modifiable objects added from an insert menu, or directly from the Widget panel.

To check out static widgets, I inserted the included course completion certificate widget in my lesson. By adding the course name in the parameters tab, it appeared on the certificate.

Dynamic widgets are more sophisticated, including Action Script 2 or 3 code. They can be created in Flash CS4, or imported from another source. Examples of dynamic widgets include customized direction buttons [forward, back] that behave in certain ways, depending upon which screen is being displayed.

Adobe provides some sample static widgets to get you started. Using dynamic widgets assumes knowledge of Adobe Flash, but you can always explore them as a future enhancement to your projects you you aren't a Flash user.

New Output Options
Captivate projects are typically output to one SWF file, but you have the option to separate your skin, widgets, full-motion recordings, and/or animations as separate SWF files. This allows for reuse of commonly used files in multiple published projects, and can means smaller SWF files.

And Captivate 4 projects can now be published to formats besides SWF. Publishing to PDF is useful, since anyone with the free Adobe Reader can use your project and does not have to be online. To embed projects in PDF files, you use Acrobat 9 Professional, also part of the Adobe eLearning Suite.

Getting Help
The Captivate 4 help files are now built using Adobe AIR, requiring internet access by default. Context-sensitive help is available by pressing <F1> wherever you are in the product. Help searches also include Adobe Community results from software users, but you can set the system to Offline for help-only results. The bookmark feature is a nice way to add web sites as favorites, and see comments from customers and the Adobe development team

A Word about Learning Captivate
Learning Captivate 4 isn't an overnight point and click learning experience. To explore it, I used a combination of resources including Adobe's online feature videos, blogs by Captivate developers and super users, the product help files, using with the product, and my trusty $35 purchased workbook entitled "Essentials of Adobe Captivate 4" from IconLogic.

There are many instructor-led and online training courses available. While more costly than my self-constructed learning roadmap and workbook, they can compress into two or three-days the skills and tasks you need to know to begin producing professional e-Learning modules with Captivate 4.

[Captivate 5 (and eLearning Suite 2) is out the door now, though it's not listed on Amazon just yet. Still, I wanted write a review for Captivate 4, since it seems to be taking an unfair beating here. If you're interested in Captivate, go download a demo of version 5 from Adobe. It is a significant upgrade over any previous version.]

I'm a software trainer; I create a lot of screencasts. This is the tool I use, day in and day out. There are other tools out there (e.g. TechSmith Camtasia Studio is probably the main competitor), but most of them simply shoot an AVI of your screen. Those sorts of tools are easy to use. On the downside, they often offer very little in the way of editing options and tend to result in very large file sizes. Captivate takes a different approach, attempting to capture only frames where something significant happens on the screen and using Flash's "tweening" technique to generate the frames in between. On the upside, this gives you enormous flexibility when editing. You can reposition the mouse, control the timing of text entry, and a great many other things besides. It also means the output files are often much smaller than those produced by other tools. On the downside, Captivate can't always pick up on screen changes, so you have to frequently tell it (via the print screen key) when a significant change has taken place. Captivate can do full-motion recording (which you can turn on and off via shortcut keys), but going that route removes the inherent advantages of Captivate's odd approach.

Most screencasting tools can only do demonstrations. But Captivate can also do simulations: walkthroughs where you require the learner to go through certain steps (pushing buttons, selecting items from drop-down menus, etc.).

Captivate is extensible, to a rather significant degree, through the creation of widgets, which are drag-n-drop components created in ActionScript (AS2 or AS3) using Adobe Flash (CS3 or CS4, for this version). Creating widgets requires an additional software license and a non-trivial amount of knowledge, but there is a growing community of widget developers who are creating tools (some free, some for pay) to extend Captivate in interesting ways, adding functionality that the designers omitted, and re-implementing existing features in new ways. This is one of the things I like best about the product.

The text-to-speech feature saves enormous amounts of production time and can be easily leveraged to add closed captioning to your projects. I use this feature daily now, and I couldn't live without it. I don't think I'll ever go back to doing actual voice overs.

The Aggregator application, while a little rough around the edges, is very useful to me. I create a separate Captivate project for each module in my presentation. I then render each module out as a separate SWF and use Aggregator to sequence them and provide a table of contents for them. This keeps file sizes small, as each module is loaded only when it is needed. It also facilitates collaboration and content reuse.

On the downside, the interface is heavy with modal dialogs, often requiring a lot of clicking around to change common settings. The "Advanced Actions" assisted-scripting interface is so tedious that creating widgets in AS3 is actually easier, even for relatively simple tasks. The audio editor is pretty bare bones. The quizzing tool is lack-luster (and the reporting options, for those who don't have or don't want an LMS, are pretty limited). In short, it's not perfect. But it is the best thing I've found. The learning curve is fairly steep, but the payoff is significant. If you're more of a fix-it-in-the-mix sort, this is probably the tool for you.

Captivate is not an easy product to work with, but what is worse, it seems to have a mind of its own. For example, create a slide with a number of one pixel lines. Duplicate that slide and the lines appear to move one pixel down and one pixel to the right. You can see this relative to the grid you can overlay on your slides; also, when you preview the project, you can see a distinct jump when it transitions from the original slide to the duplicate. However, if you look at the properties of the lines, the positioning is not changed. Therefore, the origin of the duplicated slide must have changed!@#$%

It is a lot of work cleaning this stuff up - sometimes considerably more work than to create each slide.

This behavior gets worse when you try to publish what you have created. Text and lines move, as above, and text gets distorted. If I create either rectangles or captions with text centered horizontally and vertically in a box, when I publish the project, the text is up near the top, and is distorted as if squeezed to reduce the height by a couple of pixels. Similarly, lines are moved. A process flow diagram that looks really nice on a slide, looks really bad when you create a swf movie of that slide. Nothing lines up like it was laid out.

Other problems arise when I move objects onto a slide background to get them off the timeline. Again, the slides look great, but when published, sometimes pieces of lines are missing, other times there are extraneous lines.

As with the previous 1-star review, there are many other problems that tell me that QA was significantly lacking on this product.

I contacted Adobe Support. It took them two weeks to recognize there was a problem. I put an example file on an ftp site THEY pointed me to. After 3 weeks I got an e-mail back asking ME to provide THEM the ftp path!!!!

This is a fairly inexpensive program and does a decent job of creating SCORM-compliant elearning courses, so it's hard to be too harsh, but when Captivate crashes or simply doesn't work, it can be a sense of frustration that outweighs the low cost. There aren't any really good alternatives, so it's a shame that it doesn't work better. The bottom line is that it's too buggy to be worth more than two stars.

I'm using Captivate 4. Maybe these issues are solved in 5, but who wants to re-purchase software every year or two just to get a less buggy version? If you want to make the equivalent of a narrated PowerPoint with a few simple effects that will actually work online, this is a great program. If you think of it as a PowerPoint to Flash converter, it's great. When you want to do the more complicated operations that the program is touted for, it just isn't reliable. Some days it's the answer to all my prayers, and other days it is as worthless on my desktop as a paperweight. My biggest complaint is that the glitches I encounter are not consistent. Features will work sometimes, and not work other times. For example, object timings will sometimes work fine when you preview a slide from the edit screen, but when you do a full preview the objects fail to appear. I am not a Flash programmer but if I had to guess what's going on, I would say that it seems like when the program is writing the Flash behind the scenes while I'm doing the plug-and-play operations on the front end, it is not writing the code properly sometimes, or it's writing code that conflicts with what is already there sometimes.

From a pedagogical perspective, the approach Adobe takes to assessment is antiquated. This will fly in corporate environments that have a CYA attitude toward training, but if you truly want to assess learning you're not going to like the issues you will run into with Captivate 4. It seems fine for end-of-module assessment. But it doesn't like formative assessment questions sprinkled throughout the module. It has not been easy to figure out how users might be able to keep a record of their free responses, or how I can get a record of their free responses without having a full-fledged LMS.

The problem is that there does not seem to be an alternative. I give them a C- on "works as advertised," and I hope they are making enough money on this to make something that works better on the next round.

From problems implementing the basics of eLearning presentations to the complexities of SCORM compliance, Adobe Captivate fails in every field. Very little works properly, there are a multitude of difficult to identify and resolve bugs, and the interface is extremely unintuitive. There are other ways to create SCORM compliant presentations, and they should definitely be sought out.

Nothing wrong at all with Captivate 4... except that its a Windows program.

If you're considering buying Captivate, wait for Captivate 5, which is already in Beta as of this writing. It was previewed at an eLearning conference in November (three months ago), and yes, it runs natively on OS X!

Plus, going forward, the two versions will be identical, Adobe says. So, congrats Adobe... you *finally* figured it out and did right by all the Mac folks. =]

Now, if Adobe could just bring the semi-ridiculous price down...

...