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Captivate Exchange – is it dead?

by on April 14, 2009 with 11 Comments in Captivate , General

One thing I really like about Adobe is their online market place called Exchange. If you take a look at the Adobe Exchange for Flash it’s filled with great files, which you can buy and in some cases even download for free.

Adobe Captivate also has an associated Exchange – http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/exchange/index.cfm?event=productHome&exc=22&loc=en_us – where people can upload and download Adobe Captivate related things.

There is only one problem with the Captivate Exchange… It’s dead.. The last file uploaded was on September 11th, 2008.

It’s too bad because the Captivate Exchange could be an excellent resource for widgets, templates and other great stuff for Captivate.

I uploaded a couple of things in the last 4 months, but nothing has been approved yet. Everything is still listed as a new submission.

Status: New Submission

Your upload is complete and will be submitted to our QA team for review. We will notify you by e-mail when your upload is posted to the site. You can always check this page for the most up-to-date status of your item.

 

Come on Adobe.. Approve the files before Captivate 5 is released. I’m sure lots of other files are stuck in the “New submission” queue.

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  • http://rajntechnlife.wordpress.com/ Rajeev Kumar

    we have identified the problem, working on it and by next week you should see your items approved for exchange

  • http://www.captivate4.com admin

    Excellent Rajeev! That sounds very promising indeed.

    Look forward to see the Captivate Exchange filled up with great components from all the talented people using Captivate ;o)

    /Michael

  • http://www.elearninglive.com Mark

    Glad you posted this, as I had uploaded a playbar with print button (it is just the included playbar with print button, but I edited out the hard-coded glow color). That was right when Captivate 4 first came out and I never heard anything back on my submission so I just assumed they didn’t like my submission : )

    mark
    http://www.elearninglive.com

  • http://www.captivate4.com admin

    Hi Rajeev,

    Any news on this? Still no new things on the Captivate Exchange and all my things are still listed as “New submission” and awaiting review from the Q&A team.

    /Michael

  • Steve O

    Well it is now May 22 and what’s happening? Looks like nothing. Great way to take the wind out of the sails of a promising application. The Exchange is a great idea and adds value…only if it is supported…

  • http://www.captivate4.com admin

    Hi Steve,

    The things that I have uploaded to the Exchange was added on May 19th. I also see that Mark’s playbar is added now so looks like something happened.

    Apparantly no-one else have uploaded something to the Exchange at this moment.

    I fully agree with you that the Exchange is a very important aspect of Captivate and hopefully we will see some more action there soon. One of the main reasons that I upgradede to CP4 was the introduction of the Widgets. It’s such a great idea, but if no-one is actually making widgets and uploading them to the Captivate Exchange then it’s kinda dead already.

    Hopefully Adobe will make some new widgets and upload them to the Exchange to everyone’s benefit.

    /Michael

  • emcod

    Michael, I wonder if the lack of content on the Captivate Exchange is a function of the skill level the typical Captivate user has, not to mention the motivation to go “above and beyond” in developing learning content. It would be great if some sort of incentive could be offered for Flash designers/developers to create widgets for Cp4. As it stands, I don’t think there’s much awareness in the Flash community that this need exists.

    - Steve

  • http://www.captivate4.com admin

    Hi Steve,

    I agree that the typical Captivate user most likely isn’t sitting with their noses in Flash and creating widgets, but I was really hoping that someone else was.

    Perhaps the trend is to develop rapid no-frills e-learning right now and that means no widgets and nothing outside of the standard features in Captivate etc.

    I hope that Adobe will do something to bring awareness to this widget capability of Captivate 4. There are a number of things that I can think would help.

    1. Adobe should make a white paper with instructions on the widget api and how to use it. Right now it’s a trial and error job.

    2. Adobe should develop some additional widgets and make them available on the Exchange.

    3. Adobe could launch a competition and award the 3 best widgets (based on user votes) with some decent prizes.

    /Michael

  • McQ

    You would probably find it’s not the level of the user but more the level of the documentation that is lacking. Finding anything on the extensability of widgets (which has great potential) and the apparent lockdown of accessing the various aspects of the default interface (IE how do I hide/show the TOC from a widget, how do I go about creating/modify my own playbar) leads to a lot of writer block.

    Right now it’s up to the elite to fudge through the hide and seek nature of exactly what is exposed to a widget and show it to the general public. Till then there is a lot of people in tunnels with no time, no light and a train (no lights) running straight at them from the end where the light is supposed to be, “Clear the Track!!”

    Dont get me wrong, Widgets can do a lot within the frame work that is given but widgets should really be about open access to the whole enchilada and it’s not there. Is it that widgets cant do it or is it just that the documentation isnt there or is it the nature of beast behind Captivate that makes openess just one more rev away?

  • http://www.captivate4.com admin

    McQ I totally agree with you! The documentation for the “Widget API” is totally useless.

    I actually spoke with the Product Manager for Adobe Captivate about this and he said that they were starting up a series on widget creation on the official Adobe Captivate blog. They posted the first one a couple of weeks back, but as far as I understood it will be a series of post to “educate” users as to how to create widgets.

    I also asked him if Adobe could create some more widget examples and upload them to the Adobe Exchange because the more examples the better.

    I have been messing around with widgets for some time now, but right now I have more or less abandoned it. The reason for this is that it’s much quicker and easier for me to just create the functionality I want as a regular Flash file and then import it as an animation into Captivate. To spend hours and hours troubleshooting and guessing stuff with widget creations is just not my idea of fun ;o)

    Hopefully we will see some good articles on the Adobe Captivate Official Blog in the future.

    /Michael

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