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Captivate 9 Is in The Store, What’s New – Part 1

Of the many rapid authoring tools available in the market today, Adobe Captivate is the tool of my choice. I have been using this tool to design multimedia learning courses for the past three years. Recently, Adobe has come up with its latest version – Captivate 9. Compared to the earlier version, the new version has some advanced features that can make course development easier and faster.

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Let’s take a look at the features that have been upgraded as well as newly added in Captivate 9.

Upgraded Features New Features
Responsive From Adobe Captivate Draft
Themes Assets
Shapes Knowledge Check Slide
Effects State
  Actions
  Learning Interaction
  SVG characters
  SCORM Preview
  Publish

First I would like to focus on the features that have been upgraded in the latest version, and In my next blog I will share about the new features.

Upgraded Features:

1. Responsive:

This is the feature that makes Captivate stand out. It enables the development of courses that adjust their interface automatically to the screen size of any device they are accessed on.

Moreover, it helps instructional designers view the course in various screens before it is published.

In Captivate 8, the responsive feature had three views i.e., desktop, tablet and mobile. In the latest version, Captivate 9, two dividend views have been added. They are:

  1. Tablet Landscape View
  2. Mobile Landscape View

These views help instructional designers view the course in different layouts.

Adding or closing these views is very simple. Just click the ‘+’ icon beside each view to open it and click the ‘x’ icon to close.

Responsive

As you can see in the screenshot, the two grey draggers can be used to adjust the width of the screen by dragging them either to the left or right. You can also double click near the dragger and manually enter the size as per your requirement.

The table given below shows the maximum and minimum permissible sizes for each view.

Views Width Max – Min Height Max – Min
Desktop 1280 – 420 5000 – 100
Tablet Landscape 1230 – Disable 5000 – 100
Tablet Portrait 1180 – 370 5000 – 100
Mobile Landscape 1130 – Disable 5000 – 100
Mobile Portrait 1080 – 320 5000 – 100

If you try to reduce the size of laptop and mobile view beyond the minimum permissible value in the landscape view, the view will disappear.

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In order to adjust the height of all the views, you can go to the Properties panel or click the ‘+’ icon.

Captivate provides the flexibility to increase the height up to 5000px. But you cannot scroll down beyond 1900px.

 Increase the Height

2. Themes:

Themes are often used to change the look and feel of an e-learning course. These themes can be customized to give the course a rich look compared to the original default theme. Captivate, provides default themes that can be customized by altering the colors based on your choice. In the latest version of Captivate, new themes have been added.

Themes

You can change the colors of a theme easily by clicking the ‘Theme Colors’ button.

The ‘Theme Colors’ button

3. Shapes:

Many new smart shapes have been added in Captivate 9. They are quite similar to those in Captivate 7.

Shapes

4. Effects:

Captivate 9 provides great enhancements in the Effects panel. Also, the Effects panel has now been placed in the Properties panel.

In previous version, it was very difficult to preview any animation/effect. In the latest version, if you select any effect, it automatically plays on the screen before being applied to the object and we can also see the effects in terms of icons for better understanding. We also have a new custom motion path in Captivate 9.

In the previous version, we could not apply effects to a group, but this is possible in Captivate 9.

Effects

These are the various features that have been upgraded in the new version of this tool. In my next blog I will share the new features added in this tool.

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Rapid eLearning Authoring Tools - A Training Manager's Guide