I just saw the Whyves posted a blog post about the Adobe Captivate Exchange on his blog. He is complaining about the long approval times of widgets and I can only agree. I posted about it myself back in April 2009 where I had been waiting for getting some of my widgets approved for ages.
Adobe Captivate 4 and Adobe Captivate 5 gave developers the possibility to create widgets to enhance the capabilities and functionality of Adobe Captivate. This in itself is a great feature and something I personally use quite a lot. As you probably already know I also post widgets for download for free or for sale for a small amount here on my blog. The only way that I and other widget developers can spread the news of these widgets is by using the Adobe Captivate Exchange. However, if the approval times are so slow as they are then the Exchange practically becomes useless.
The Adobe Captivate Exchange was updated on 26 & 28 of July 2010. I had 4 widgets approved so I should be happy. The four widgets were uploaded to the Adobe Captivate Exchange by me on November 2009, December 2009, March 2010 and April 2010 so the worst-case scenario was 8 months approval time and the fastest 3 months. That’s just not good enough. 3 months is way to long – 1 month should be sufficient to look over the submissions and post them to the Exchange.
Worst of all is that in this recent update Adobe missed 3 of my widgets that I had hoped to get approved. Two of the widgets were widgets for Adobe Captivate 5 and it would have been great to have these approved now that Adobe Captivate 5 is live. The last widget is my Domainlock widget for Adobe Captivate 4 – this was uploaded to the Exhange in August 2009. This particular widget has been flagged as “Status: In QA Process – Our QA team is now testing your Exchange upload. You cannot modify your upload at this time” since October 2009 – That’s a pretty long Q&A process ;o)
Here are the update dates for the Adobe Captivate Exchange for the last two years:
11-september-2008
19&20-may-2009
14-october-2009
26&28-july-2010
Lets get the wheels turning a bit quicker to benefit everyone using Adobe Captivate. A living marketplace for Widgets and other Captivate resources is a great way to keep the Captivate community and developers happy and frankly a great product like Adobe Captivate deserves it.
/Michael
10 Comments
While we’re all waiting for Adobe to fix the Exchange, I think we should get behind community efforts like Tristan’s new Widget Treasury: http://www.infosemantics.com.au/widgetking/the-widget-pages/
Hi Michael,
Let’s hope that Adobe will hear our calls. Thanks for posting on this topic as well. Tristan’s initiative is a welcome addition. I wasn’t aware that he launched this.
Whyves
Hi folks , Share your sentiments .. I am directly responsible for approval and I am not interested at this point to give reasons for delay. Going futhur I will make sure that any new widget is approved in less than four weeks. Thanks for your support as always
Suresh
Sr. QE manager , Captivate || E-learning suite
@ Wheat – I didn’t see Tristans initiative before now but that is actually a great idea.
@Whyves – Looks like they did 😉
@ Suresh – Thank you very much for your quick reply and I’m really happy to hear that the Exchange will get the attention it needs.. Now to get busy creating some new widgets ;o)
That’s great news!
@Suresh
What about the current backlog? Any timeframe when we can expect to have the other widgets published?
Thanks!
Yves
Current backlog is “ZERO” .. there are 4 incomplete posts which I am not able to delete .. rest is cleared. Once again thanks for your support and patience folks. I assure that you don’t have to wait even 4 weeks if you send me a private email after uploading your content ..
@Suresh – Excellent! Thank you very much for your prompt action and information!
@Suresh – Thanks! I’m sure that having an healthy Exchange will help promote the platform. Good work!
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@Suresh – it seems like the “thumbnail” feature on the Captivate Exchange is broken. If you upload a thumbnail on a new submission then you just get the “error image” with the red x.