Adobe Captivate 5 is a complete rewrite of the Adobe Captivate application. This is also very clear once you open up the app. The style and layout now resembles the other Adobe CS apps. Whether or not this is a good thing can be discussed but in my view the GUI looks a bit depressing. I live in Scandinavia and half of the year we live in a world of grey – now my favourite app resembles a danish winter ;o)
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Apart from the GUI colors some good things have been implemented. First of all I like the panels approach as this allow you to dock and undock panels and move them where you want to have them. This is particularly great if you are using multiple monitors.
Another great thing about the panels is that many options are available to you straight away. No need to open up slides or objects properties to access options and parameters. This can be done directly in the panels now. This will speed up development but more importantly it will save you from unnessecary mouse-clicks.
If you look at the main screen when no object is selected you have access to the slide properties straight away. Earlier versions of Adobe Captivate required that you double-click the slide or selected properties to access these parameters.
Now one of the really great things about these panels in Adobe Captivate 5 is that they are “object aware”. Basically this means that when you select an object the properties panel will switch to reflect the properties for the selected object.
If we create a standard Text Caption in Adobe Captivate 5 we will see the following Properties panel:
This will save a tremendeous amount of time when you are working with and adjusting Text Captions.
The properties panel in Adobe Captivate 5 for a button object looks like this:
The button Properties Panel is larger due to the many different options with this object so you can scroll down to reveal more settings and parameters.
An independent study commission by Adobe amongst the Beta testers of Adobe Captivate 5 shows that the new UI will allow you to save substantial time when developing in Captivate.
As the other Adobe CS apps you also have the ability to modify and design your own workspaces. Adobe Captivate 5 comes with 6 prebuilt workspaces – “Applying skin”, “Classic”, “Navigation”, “Quizzing”, “Review” and “Widget” but you can easily create your own. I have always liked this feature as I can create my own favourite views and switch between them easily.
/Michael
