Captivate, Macromedia’s reincarnation of RoboDemo, is a powerful, easy-to-use tool for creating professional quality demos, interactive tutorials and handouts. Its organization and usability are intuitive enough that I was quickly and easily able to produce a basic application simulation complete with auto-generated captions and narration.
The tool allows you to narrate while recording, add voice-overs/sound effects at the end or to synch background music in mp3 format to the “movie”. Re-recording is kept to a minimum since all text boxes, mouse paths, audio recordings and display times for individual frames are editable. Editing is simple since Captivate saves screen images as individual slides which can be manipulated in the edit view by dragging and dropping controls, superimposing outside images and setting slide properties. Though I did not try this – apparently, you can seamlessly incorporate Power Point presentations into your project and save them in Flash format. The edit view also contains a timeline which makes it easy to view the current slide in its context to the overall project and re-order, if desired.
The finished movie can be published in Flash format for web viewing or as a Windows, Mac or Linux executable. Individual slides can be saved as Word documents to be used as handouts or marketing materials. You can even publish the file to the web using built-in FTP technology.
Given its ease of use, this tool could be handy for demonstrating new functionality before you might be ready to let your client loose in your application, capturing feedback about UIs or functionality during a user acceptance testing session or just illustrating a certain “look and feel”.
My only criticism of Captivate so far is the length of time it takes to load and publish projects. At least the user is allowed to play back short clips at a time to view changes, which makes editing less painful. It would also be nice to be able to adjust the overall speed while the movie is playing. But, the 30 day free trial makes it hard to complain.
