Today Adobe has released the free Adobe Captivate 8.0.1 patch. This patch fixes a lot of annoying bugs and also gives you a couple of new features to play around with.
How do I get the update?
To get the update open Adobe Captivate 8, and click Help > Updates and install the update from there. You can also directly download and install the update from here in case your Adobe Captivate application doesn’t show the update yet (sometimes it is a bit slow).
After Captivate has finished upgrading you must delete your preferences, layouts and sample projects folder before opening Captivate again. Before you delete these I recommend that you make a backup copy of them.
The Layouts folder can be found at:
- Windows: C:\Users\Public\Documents\Adobe\eLearning Assets\
- Mac OS: /Users/<user account>/Documents/My Adobe Captivate Projects/
Sample projects folders can be found at:
- Windows: C:\Users\Public\Documents\Adobe\eLearning Assets\SampleProjects
- Mac OS: /Users/<user account>/Documents/My Adobe Captivate Projects/SampleProjects
Here are the full paths to the preferences folders:
- Win7: C:\Users\[user]\AppData\Local\Adobe\Adobe Captivate 8
- Mac OS: /Users/[user]/Library/Preferences/Adobe Captivate 8
Once you have installed the update the Captivate version will be 8.0.1.242
If you have a lot of customization’s in your current Adobe Captivate 8 installation you might want to keep these. Lieve wrote an excellent article here on how to keep your settings when upgrading.
So what do we get with this update. I have selected my favorite new features or bug fixes and listed them below.
Selected new features:
Let’s start with one I know will make a lot of people happy. EXE publishing has returned to Adobe Captivate 8.1. You now have the possiblity to publish as .exe again 🙂
Another cool new feature is that the standard Success / Failure text captions can now be replaced with Smart Shapes. This makes it a lot easier to maintain a consistent look throughout your project if you are using Smart Shapes as Text Captions.
Another feature which makes me very happy is that you now have a visual indication on the timeline for objects which have an effect attached. A small but long overdue fix.
How many times have you inserted a link to a PDF or a Word document in your course and then forgot to manually copy/paste it to the published folder? In Captivate 8.1 any linked files in Open URL / Open File / Open Project will automatically be copied to the published output folder.
For Mobile / Responsive projects you have support for iOS8.0.2, the ability to use Drag and Drop in responsive projects and support for custom shapes and lines in responsive projects.
You’ll also get direct PhoneGap integration with Adobe Captivate 8.1 I haven’t tried it out yet, but it will interesting to test this. Earlier PhoneGap had a limit of maximum 25 mb, which made it pretty much useless for Captivate projects, but I don’t know if this limit has been raised yet.
Selected bug fixes:
- Photoshop round tripping work now works with Photoshop CC 2014.
- The bug where you couldn’t have an audio slide after a random question slide has been fixed./
- The disappearing Timing tab bug has been fixed.
- It is now possible to export video closed captions.
- There are now only one video file when you publish to SWF + HTML5. Earlier if you inserted an MP4 file the output contained two instances of the video.
- Upgrade bugs have been weeded out. Earlier you would get prompted constantly to upgrade the project even though the project was already upgraded. Styles can now be exported from upgraded projects and the two new CpInfoGeoLocation and cpInfoMobileOS variables now appears in upgraded projects.
- After deleting a slide or object group you can now reuse the instance name of the deleted objects. Now let’s please have the same functionality for deleted variables!
A full list of the bug fixes can be found here.
