When Fluid Boxes were launched in Captivate 2017 Release, I was pleased with this approach to responsive design. However, I felt like some aspects needed improvement. For me, the main thing was resizing of Fluid Boxes. Resizing Fluid Boxes was done by using the blue selection handles and dragging your mouse. Even using Rulers and Guides this was a difficult task of precisely setting up Fluid Boxes of an exact size. I’m pleased to report that with Captivate 2019 you can select the Fluid Boxes to resize them to a precise number of pixels or percentage by selecting the Fluid Box and navigating over to your Position panel. From there you can type in a percentage or pixel count, and you’re done. This is useful when you have a Fluid Box that serves the same purpose on many different slides in your project. For example, a Fluid Box dedicated to slide titles or navigation controls.

Another improvement that we’ve been asking for is the ability to correct for misaligned or improperly distributed objects within a fluid box, or for that matter wrongly distributed fluid boxes within a parent fluid box. Adobe has provided a simple button to distribute these object equally. This works well when I’ve resized something by accident.

I think my favourite improvement to fluid boxes in Captivate 2019 is the ability to align Static Fluid Boxes. Regular Fluid Boxes are great when your content is side by side. However, if you need your content to overlap, or require additional state objects, you need a Static Fluid Box. As we now know, Static Fluid Boxes have to maintain their aspect ratio. This means that as you shrink from one screen size to another, the content in a Static Fluid Box always shrinks with it. In Captivate 2017 the Static Fluid Box would always remain centered within the area for that Fluid Box. It wasn’t always what I had in mind with my design. Fortunately, with Captivate 2019 you can now choose a custom alignment for Static fluid boxes. You can align the Static Fluid Box any number of ways both horizontally and vertically.

This next improvement isn’t an improvement to fluid boxes, but I sure could have used it earlier this year when designing a series of modules for a client whose target device was iPads. This organisation doesn’t use computers, but each location has several iPads for a variety of purposes including training. No problem for me because I have an iPad. There was just one problem. Every time I wanted to test a version of one of the modules, I needed to publish it for HTML5, upload the published course to my web server, email myself the URL so I could pick it up on my iPad and then launch the course. With all the iterations of each module and a total of about two dozen modules, this was time-consuming. Thankfully now I will have access to Live Preview on Devices, a new preview method in Captivate 2019 that displays a QR code on your computer screen. With a mobile device on the same Wi-Fi network as your computer, you point your camera at your screen, and the course magically launches on your device.

I know that some eLearning designer-developers downplay the importance of responsive design, but look around at some of the remote workers and see what equipment they are using. In the early 2000s when the price of laptops came down, we started seeing remote workers using laptops. For example, you might see appliance repair persons, telecom installers and various others using laptops for managing what was traditionally done with pen, paper and clipboards. I’ve been observing these workers using a variety of different tablets and in some cases even larger smartphones. I’ve also seen a restaurant using tablets for the servers to take guest orders. This tells me that responsive design will be the way we all design some day. I predict that if in 5 years time if you’re not designing responsive elearning, you will not have a competitive edge. When you look at the improvements to fluid boxes in Captivate 2019, it is clear that Adobe is preparing for that eventuality.