Macromedia Captivate Review

Throughout this review, I’ve only touched on a handful of the functionality that Captivate has to offer.  I didn’t even get into how you can put interactive and conditional fields and logic into the presentation, so the end-user can actually control the flow of the presentation.  According to Macromedia’s website, you can enhance your applications by easily adding:

• Captions, audio, and images
• Flash animations and video
• Interactions with branching and scoring
• Highlights, hyperlinks, rollovers, and more

This is one of those applications that someone can (and probably will) write a book about how to get the most out of it.  It has been my goal to give you, the reader, enough information about the application to see if it might fill a need in your organization.

In my time working for technical companies, I have come across and used several pieces of software that claim to do exactly what Captivate does.  But I can tell you from experience that most of them do not even come close to giving you as much power and flexibility as Captivate.  Here is a short list of the biggest pros and cons:

Pros:

• Has simple to learn interface
• Presentation is broken down into convenient “slide” interface
• Allows full control over events within a slide
• Tons of wonderful features
• Exports to FLASH (small file size, high resolution)

Cons:

• ONLY exports to FLASH swf or exe file

Overall this is an amazing piece of software.  If you are looking to create some sort of tutorial or demonstration about actions on the computer, you should definitely take a look at Captivate to see if it will fit your needs.  If you would like to see a tutorial created using Captivate, visit http://images.devshed.com/tut/ds/bcms1/tutorial.php.