Captivate for Mac Spotted!

November 19, 2009

RJ Jacquez, Senior Product Evangelist at Adobe, posted a sneak peek of Captivate for Mac on his blog last week after demoing it at the Adobe Learning Summit / DevLearn 09 in San Jose (an event I was unable to attend).

The radio silence regarding Captivate for Mac has been deafening, so I was thrilled (yet not thrilled – see below) to see some updated information regarding this much-anticipated application.

Tech support note: if you’re a card-carrying über-geek like me and are already running the Flash Player 10.1 prerelease version on your Mac, you will likely find (as I did) that the recording will not play (I tried Safari, Firefox and Camino). I managed to view the recording on another Mac that does not have the 10.1 prerelease installed.

A couple of takeaways from RJ’s recording:

First: the UI is not horrible like the current Windows version of Captivate, but it’s not very Mac-like either. When TechSmith created a Mac version of Camtasia, they scrapped the also-horrible UI of the Windows version of Camtasia and designed a beautiful Mac-like interface (as covered in my review of the application). Adobe, in contrast, is taking a more middle-of-the-road approach. Rather than create a Mac-like version of Captivate, they are going to make the UI of both Captivate for Mac and Captivate for Windows more CS4-like. The application on both platforms will, per RJ’s description, be very similar in look and feel (and code base). So while that’s a disappointment on the Mac side (let’s face it, the CS4 UI is nothing special), at least we can expect to see the terrible UI on the Windows side be put out of its (our) misery. I understand how such standardization between platforms is beneficial to both Adobe and its customers, but the homogenization is a disappointment to many of us Mac users who like seeing Mac apps shine in their own unique way.

Second (and this is the alarming tidbit): RJ said Captivate for Mac is currently in alpha status. Whoa, what??? Didn’t Adobe solicit for beta testers way back in May??? With so much time having passed since the beta solicitation, I had hoped a release announcement was imminent. Mark hopes as “dashed.”

RJ will be giving away a free copy of Captivate for Mac to one of his Twitter followers (see his blog entry), so jump in. You could be the lucky winner. You know, when the app is finally released. Sometime in…2012. *sob*

Posted in Adobe, Apple, eLearning Development Tools