May 24, 2018
Captivate Upgrades
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(8)
May 24, 2018
Captivate Upgrades
Newbie 2 posts
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(8)

Captivate Folks,

I’ve been working with Adobe products (Acrobat DC, Illustrator, PhotoShop, Indesign, Premier, Etc.) for a couple years now as a hobbyist. I’ve been a technical trainer for a little over 5 years and my work recently offered to buy me a copy of Captivate. I was pretty excited as I was already familiar with the Adobe CC style interfaces and I’ve been impressed with the options available in those product sets. So I was a bit shocked when I opened Captivate to find that the UI was a bit dated and how difficult it was to use even the most basic functions and the lack of basic usability and functionality.

Maybe I am new and I just don’t know what I’m talking about. But I would expect things, like working in a text box and scrolling over the edge anchors, would allow you to resize the box. Unfortunately, that’s not the case, you have to click off the text box, then click on it again, then you can select the text box anchors to resize it. Also small but important details like making a bullet point a different color than the copy text. Looking at the various shapes available for on-screen drawing also leaves me lack in the desired variability.

Trying to think of solutions for these issues is important as just complaining about something puts the burden of resolution on others. With that, I think this should be wrapped into the Creative Cloud Suite and get a UI overhaul to match the new slick design and options of CC.

8 Comments
2018-06-01 19:23:38
2018-06-01 19:23:38

I think you mean what I call ‘minimize panels to an icon’. If yes please log a feature request!!!

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2018-06-01 19:11:44
2018-06-01 19:11:44

I’d like to see snapable sidebars as well. Imagine if we could have simple small icon sidebars we could click on to open the options menu instead of having them pinned all around the creative space.

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2018-05-25 18:00:17
2018-05-25 18:00:17

Smiling, becasue that awful Big Button Bar is annoying you as much as me! UI in CP7 was the best, with the exception that the Properties panel was growing too big. I loved the floating small vertical toolbar, the possibility to minimize panels to an icon (similar to CC apps).
I don’t understand the complaint about the text container resizing: I always use shapes, and resize often with shortcut keys, find it even easier than in AI. Photoshop roundtripping is great in CP. CP used to be bitmap only, now at least we can use SVG which I create with AI. Totally agree about the raw video demo file which cannot be opened in Premiere Pro, but only very few CP-users seem to use video demo at all (concurrent Camtasia). Software simulations in CP are slide-based, which has a lot of advantages, and I cannot see why this would have to be imported in Premiere Pro at all.
In the first place I wish for more customisability in Captivate, more like in CP7.

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2018-05-25 17:50:32
2018-05-25 17:50:32

There is no doubt that the UI of Captivate is sub-optimal. Even though I own versions 8, 9, and 2017, I still usually develop with version 7 mainly because it doesn’t have the giant toolbar that takes up so much vertical space that I cannot have a 1024×768 stage and a reasonable-sized Timeline on even a 24″ monitor. One learns to get used to its quirks because of what it allows you to create, however. I can make an engaging eLearning very quickly with it, thanks to the built-in Text-to-Speech capabilities, basic scripting, and flexible tools for asset management.

Regarding your specific complaint about not being able to resize a text box, I completely agree that there are many subtle things that could be much better. One trick: when typing in a text caption box (or SmartShape with text) selected, and want to resize its dimensions, you can press the ESC key to bring up its anchor points.

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2018-05-25 17:33:58
2018-05-25 17:33:58

No doubt this software is a multi-tool, I agree there wholeheartedly. I’m also going to continue using it as it’s the supported product by my company. But there are just basic functionality issues that make the simplest of actions like resizing a text box tedious. The UI looks less like an Adobe product more like a windows XP era product. I’d also like to see inter-compatibility between the products expand significantly. I’d like to be able to seamlessly pull video capture out of Captivate into Premier and back, pull a graphic right out of illustrator into Captivate. Seems like it’s missing the mark in a few key areas. I think Captivate could benefit greatly from combining teams with the CC folks, merging the UI, adding functionality from different suites in CC, and from being a part of the CC bundle in general.

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2018-05-25 16:41:56
2018-05-25 16:41:56

Thanks for the support. I only switch to JS when CP is not capable to do what I want with advanced/shared actions which are really underestimated and much easier to understand and manage by clients. Lot of the use cases I see explained here with JS can be done with those actions.

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2018-05-25 16:39:47
2018-05-25 16:39:47

I agree with you on the UI of Captivate, it is quite sluggish and unattractive. As Lieve stated, once you get past that you can still create some great things in Captivate. If you get a little into javascript you can make some fun things happen in Captivate. I’m still just learning, but I’ve found learning some code has expanded what I can do in Captivate quite a bit.

That being said, I do wish Captivate had a little interface overhaul to bring some simple but useful things in like resizing multiple objects at the same time and having them scale together, holding the space bar to give you the hand tool and move around the canvas/stage/etc. Those things would be great and I’ve added some of these into feature requests, hopefully Adobe will take a look at those sort of things soon!

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2018-05-25 08:25:42
2018-05-25 08:25:42

I agree about the UI, was much more like the other CC applications until the change appeared with CP8. You understand that I am a frequent user of CC applications as well (been a PS trainer for 20 years). There is no suite anymore. Captivate is in a totally different business unit, still has a perpetual license which is no longer the case for CC, and doesn’t fit in the CC family.
As for your expectations, may I kid a little bit? Captivate combines features of InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, Audition, Animate, After Effects ad Premiere Pro in one tool, and adds on top of that the functionality of a full blown eLearning authoring tool, allows creating responsive projects (Dreamweaver, late Muse?) both with Fluid Boxes and Breakpoint Views, you can use PhoneGap to create mobile apps, it can transfer grades, scores and other data to a LMS…. I will not continue with my list, but it is not complete (I always use Captivate for presentations as well, much more flexible than PPT). I can cope with the UI, and learned to be realistic: in a Swiss knife, the ‘knife’ tool will never have the superior quality of a great ‘knife’ brand, same with scissors and other tools.
As for CC: how different was the UI between PS, AI and Animate? It is still the case. Why are shortcut keys acting in different ways in CC applications?
Please, take some time to explore Captivate, don’t focus on differences, but on features that you will never find in any CC app. Just one example (you have to copy the URL, cannot convert it to a link) of a presentation converted to an interactive movie:
http://www.lilybiri.com/published/TimelineBlog/index.html

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