So, this month's meeting at my user group was on Macromedia's Captivate software. Since I was the one actually giving the presentation, I figured I'd better spend a little time learning it. After just a few minutes working with it, I was blown away by how powerful it was. The more I dug into the features, the more impressed I was.
At a basic level - you can use Captivate to create simple demonstrations. For example - how do you set up CFEclipse projects. You could create a simple Captivate presentation in five minutes and send it off. I can see using this for clients who need a little help and who are remote. No more guessing - you can show them exactly what to do.
Captivate also has powerful quizzing and simulation features. I played with a sample quiz and it was incredibly simple to set up. Results can be stored in a variety of formats with no additional work.
Something else I really liked were the export options. You can export to Flash (obviously), but also to Breeze, an executable, a cd-rom (and it will add the autorun type stuff for you), as well as Word. Now the Word export is slick. When you export to Word, you are basically creating hand outs for your presentation. This includes screen shots and a place for notes.
All in all - a darn slick tool. I'm hoping to have a few examples online soon.
Archived Comments
Would you mind making one of your examples 'How to set up CFEclipse projects?'
I recently recommended purchasing it to produce the online demos at my current employer, and we had a similar feeling when we used it. We were seriously impressed by how simple it was to build complex demos that used to take days of tedious Flash work. We probably saved the cost of the product on its first official use.
Ray,
Personally I wish Marcomedia would use their own awesome products for some valuable training on their products.
Case in point. I have been trying to setup a cluster with CFMX on a single box for weeks now. Basically what I mean is I have one box, with one IP address and I'm trying to get JRun to cluster the multiple server instances of CFMX. Can't get this to work for the life of me. Tried to follow every single instructions out there: Brandon Parcell's, Macromedia's, Talking Tree's, everyone saids it's easy and the their instructions work.
Now wouldn't it be great if Macromedia used Captivate to create a presentation on how to do this and showed us all EXACTLY how it is done? I love Macromedia products but I find that most of the time (especially with CFMX and JRUN) they tell you that this can be done and don't give you the instructions on how to do it. They rely on the community to give out the information and most of the time getting anything from the community is like pulling teeth.
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