Chapter 1. Getting Started with Captivate

Since its introduction in 2004, Captivate has always been the industry-leading solution for authoring eLearning content. In the beginning, it was a very simple screen-capture utility called FlashCam. In 2002, a company named eHelp acquired FlashCam and turned it into an eLearning authoring tool called RoboDemo. In 2004, another company called Macromedia acquired eHelp, changed the name of the product once again, and 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 rewrote 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 that of other Adobe applications, not mentioning an impressive array of new and enhanced tools.

Version 6 was another milestone for Captivate as it was the first version to propose an HTML5 publishing mechanism. Prior to Captivate 6, the main publishing option was Adobe Flash.

As of today, the latest version of Captivate is Version 7. Captivate 7 comes with improved HTML5 support, an enhanced interactions library, good drag-and-drop interaction, the ability to record system audio, and tons of other (not so) small enhancements. With all this power sitting one click away, it is easy to overcharge your projects with lots of complicated audiovisual effects and 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 authoring 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-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 this changes everything…

In this chapter, we shall: