Adobe Captivate 3

I had the pleasure of being one of the first, perhaps the very first, to present Captivate 3 in a live conference setting. My company and I personally have been using this product since it was called RoboDemo because it's a great product for doing a lot of what we do for our clients. It's unmatched at creating software simulations but also can be used for creating lots of other kinds of e-learning, including soft skills training. I often tout it as a product that balances ease of use with power - a constant struggle for any e-learning tool developer.

Jaws dropped when I showed both Captivate 2 and Captivate 3, which was just released. They loved the trimode recording, how they now can retain animations from PowerPoint imports, the fact that quizzes can now be randomized and the new transitions.

Most of the people had never used Captivate before so every feature was new to them. They were really happily surprised by the product. One person moaned about how they had wasted their money on Firefly (a much more expensive competing product) and found it so hard to use that they had given up on it. Now that they had seen how easy Captivate was they were going to have their organization get it right away! You can see more about Captivate here. I'll write more about Captivate soon.

I'm proud of the fact that some very good friends of mine were involved in the creation of Captivate 3. Among them are:

Group Business Development Manager
--Marc Hosein

Product Marketing Managers
--Silke Fleischer
--Karl Matthews

Core Director
--Tridb Roy Chowdhury

Engineering
--Stefan van As

Don't be upset if your name isn't on the list above. That either means that I forgot you were involved or you need to be a better friend to me (haha).

Here's a partial list of new features in Captivate 3. This is directly out of the Help section, so I'm quoting here.

Multimode recording
Save time and generate robust software simulations with multiple learning modes in a single recording session, including a demonstration of the procedure, a simulation for practicing the steps, and an assessment.

Randomized quizzing and question pools
Improve learner assessments by randomly drawing questions from a set of question pools. Shuffle the answer options for multiple-choice questions, so that the answers are displayed in a different order each time. Share question pools among multiple Adobe Captivate projects.

Rollover slidelets
Provide additional just-in-time information on Adobe Captivate 3 slides by displaying media-rich content including images, text, audio, and video in a slidelet (a mini-slide within a slide) when the learner moves the mouse over a specified area on the slide.

XML export and import
Simplify the localization process of projects; export captions to a text or XML Localization Interchange File Format (XLIFF) file. Import the translated text file into a copy of the original project file.

Automated rerecording
Quickly update content and automatically rerecord entire procedures in most web applications after the user interface is modified or localized (Internet Explorer® 6).

Animation effects
Create learning content with support for animated slide transitions (besides fade in / fade out) and PowerPoint® animations. Import PowerPoint (PPT) files and retain many animation effects by converting PowerPoint slides to SWF files.

New question types
Increase learning effectiveness with specialized question types, such as sequencing and hotspots, and matching dropdown lists.

Streamlined workflow and usability enhancements

1. Work faster with a wide variety of streamlined workflows and usability enhancements:
2. Improved learning management system (LMS) integration
3. Reusing quiz slides
4. Reducing SWF file size
5. Branching view enhancements, such as slide grouping and zooming
6. New choices for adding captions and buttons
7. Microsoft® Windows Vista™ and Microsoft Office 2007 support
8. Install Adobe Captivate 3 on Windows Vista and import PowerPoint (PPT) files from Office 2007, or create handouts or step-by-step procedures with the Microsoft Word export option.

Re-recording software simulations
When changes are introduced into a software application, or when you need to create separate projects in multiple languages, you can use the re-recording feature in Adobe Captivate.

To do this, you must select the option to generate re-recording information when you create a new Adobe Captivate project. As a result, a script file (.cprr) is created
When changes are introduced into a software application, or when you need to create separate projects in multiple languages, you can use the re-recording feature in Adobe Captivate.
To do this, you must select the option to generate re-recording information when you create a new Adobe Captivate project. As a result, a script file (.cprr) is created. You can use the Generate Re-recording Information option when you first generate a project to create a re-recording script file. The re-recording script is saved as an XML file with the .cprr extension.

Learn more about Adobe Captivate here.