Adobe Captivate 5: Sneak Peek!

by Kevin Siegel

I'm attending Adobe's Learning Summit in San Jose right now. RJ Jacquez, Senior Product Evangelist just wowed the crowd with a sneak preview of the upcoming Adobe Captivate 5 for the Macintosh.

Here are some of the highlights:

• Captivate is being recreated from the ground-up. The new software is being written in C++ instead of Delphi (which was the programming language used for the other versions of Captivate). As a result, the Macintosh and PC versions will be the same.
  
  
• Captivate 5 works natively on a Macintosh. If you are a Mac fan (like me), this is a huge, huge deal! Sweet!!!!
  
  
• Captivate 5 features the same common user interface as the other Adobe applications. For instance, can dock panels anywhere on your screen. Once you set up your screen the way you like, you can save the environment as a Workspace. From that point forward, you can quickly switch between one Workspace and another.
  
  
• There won't be any dialog boxes in Captivate 5. For the first time, you will use pods (available in your workspace) to change the properties of selected objects.
  
  
• While recording, you will now see a countdown (3-2-1) just before the recording begins. Nice improvement since in the older versions of Captivate you weren't always sure when the recording process actually began.
  
  
• For the first time, you can work in one Captivate project, open another or create a new Captivate project and move content between the open projects.
  
  
• Improved Photoshop support. While you could import Photoshop files and include the layers in Captivate 4, the process has been sped up so much that if you blink you'll miss it. This is a nice improvement over Captivate 4.
  
  
• Insert multiple Question slides at the same time. The improved Question Types dialog box got the biggest applause during RJ's presentation. You can now elect to add 3 Multiple Choice questions, 2 True/False slides, etc. Anyone who has had to add question slides, one at a time, knows how cool this new feature is.

***

Looking to create killer eLearning lessons with Adobe Captivate? Join one of IconLogic's classes, or contact us for custom group or onsite training rates. Click here for more information about our 2-day Captivate Essentials class. Looking for more Advanced Captivate 4 training? We have you covered. Click here for more information.

Worried about your class canceling? You'll be happy to hear that we never, ever cancel our classes (even if there's just one student registered).

***

Follow Kevin on Twitter: http://twitter.com/iconlogic.

Comments

[Bob Cunningham]

Hey Kevin. Thanks for the tantalizing update. But what are "pods"?

[david b]

Kevin,

In regards to the countdown...hasn't that always been a feature at least since captivate 2?

Do you mean it works better?

[Kevin Siegel]

The countdown only appears in CP4 if you include narration. In CP5, the countdown begins even if you elect not to record narration.

[paper writers]

I kinda new here. Please allow me to learn in this thing.

[ldumitre]

Any info about a release date?