Current State of Affairs with Adobe Captivate
There have been many complaints about Captivate and Project Charm lately on the forums. I decided to weigh in with a few thoughts of my own. It's not uncommon for new technology to experience delays. For example, the period between Windows XP and Windows Vista was five years due to Microsoft trying to accomplish too much with this update.
I think the biggest mistake Adobe has made with Adobe Captivate was to switch from version numbers to version years. I wonder if we would be as upset as we are if, in August of 2018, Adobe marketed with version 11.0.0.243 and followed it up with the following updates:
11.0.1.266
11.5.0.476
11.5.4.499
11.5.4.613 (macOS only)
11.5.5.553 (Windows) / 11.5.5.676 (macOS)
11.8.0.586 (Windows subscription)
11.8.0.710 (macOS subscription)
Most of these were bug fixes, but Adobe added some new features to Adobe Captivate during this journey. As a result, Adobe would have been justified in releasing it as version 12 due to the new capabilities we didn't have before. I would have liked to see a version of the software that removed all the legacy features such as learning interactions incompatible with HTML5 and removed the ability to publish to PhoneGap and SWF. This update could have been called Adobe Captivate 2021 and released the same month when support for Flash Player ended. Adobe could have based on the same code base we have now, giving them time to work on a significant change like Project Charm.
Incidentally, I'm curious what feature(s) people feel they are missing in Adobe Captivate 2019. I use it every day and am capable of building effective elearning for my clients. Don't get me wrong. I'm not an apologist for Adobe, nor am I necessarily a fanboy, but while Adobe Captivate 2019 isn't as pretty as what we saw in the demo last year, I still feel it's an instrumental piece of software for me. But, of course, this is just my opinion. The rest of you may have some valid points that I'm not picking up on. However, I will say that I think many of you are running the software under less than ideal hardware or circumstances. I don’t experience the issues that some of you are complaining about.
