Chapter 1. Getting Started with Captivate

Since its introduction in 2004, Captivate has always been the industry-leading solution for authoring eLearning content. At the beginning, it was a very simple screen-capture utility named FlashCam. In 2002, a company named eHelp acquired FlashCam and turned it into an eLearning authoring tool named Robodemo. In 2004, another company called Macromedia acquired eHelp and changed the name of the product one last time. Macromedia Captivate was born. A few months later, Adobe acquired Macromedia and, consequently, Macromedia Captivate became Adobe Captivate.

As the years passed, Adobe released Captivate 2, Captivate 3 and Captivate 4, adding tools, objects, and features along the way. One of the most significant events in the Captivate history took place in July 2010, when Adobe released Captivate 5. For the release of Captivate 5, Adobe engineers have rewritten the code of the entire application from the ground up. As a result, Captivate 5 was the first version to be available on both Mac OS and Windows. Captivate 5 was also equipped with a brand new user interface, similar to the interface of other Adobe Applications, not to mention an impressive array of new and enhanced tools.

As of today, the latest version of Captivate is version 6. Captivate 6 comes with a new improved quiz engine that supports partial scoring and pretests, HTML5 publishing, advanced interactions, new Smart Shapes, a new video capture mode, and tons of other (not so) small enhancements. With all this power sitting one click away, it is easy to overcharge our projects with lots of complicated sound and visual effects, lots of sophisticated interactions that can ultimately drive the user away from the primary objective of every Captivate Project: teaching.

While working with Captivate, one should never forget that Captivate is an eLearning tool. At the most basic level, it simply means that you, the developer of the Project, and your audience are united by a very special kind of relationship: a student to teacher relationship. Therefore, from now on, and for the rest of the book, you, the reader of these pages, will not be called "the developer" or "the programmer", but the teacher, and the ones who will view your finished applications will not be the "users" or "the visitors", but will be called the learners or the students. You will see that it changes everything.

In this chapter, we will: