Nine Sexy New Features of Adobe Captivate 9

Many of you know that I organize the Adobe eLearning User Group - Carolinas Meetup.

This month my Adobe eLearning User Group co-manager, Josh Cavalier, and one of my co-workers, James Crump, did a free online presentation on our 9 favorite new features of Adobe Captivate 9. 

If you'd like to see a recap of the hour long presentation click here. Here is a short recap of my 3 favorite new features:

1. Responsive Design

Captivate 9 now makes it even faster and easier to create responsive eLearning projects. You have the option of adding (or deleting) two additional breakpoints, so up to 5 breakpoints. And you can customize the size and name you of each breakpoint by typing it in (rather than just dragging it). You can also type in the device height.

Additionally, if you don't want your users to view your course in the mobile landscape view, you can turn the ability for them to turn their phones to landscape in Preferences > Project > Publish Settings > Disallow phone landscape. You can even write a custom message as to why that view is not available.

Another of the other features in Responsive Design that I love is that you can turn of Gesture Navigation for specific slides, if you desire. This is a great option because if you have actions for branching your users  gesture navigation will trump the button trigger.

But wait, there's more...In responsive projects now, if desired, you can align objects center horizontally and vertically on the slide. And you even have the option to Apply all to objects of the same style or the same type. These are time saving features for developers.




Additionally all the new Effects and States are completely functional in Responsive projects, which is really cool because that means that you add some really engaging interactions without having to go to other tools. For example, In a project I originally developed in Captivate 8 I could not create a particular interaction because there was not the ability to use Delayed Actions within the advanced action dialog box. Well in Captivate 9 you can.... keep reading.

2. Advanced Actions 

Sometimes it is the small simple things that make developing eLearning so much easier. For instance, just by adding a check box to either continue the project or pause the project when a simple action is being triggered makes it so that you either don't have to add a click box or don't have to create an advanced action just for one action. I love this!!!


Okay, but now here is the really exciting stuff, you can now add delayed actions and delayed effects into your advanced actions. The video below shows you how when the user clicks the first box, the arrow animates and then the circle appears after 2 seconds. Then the second box also because active. In Captivate 9 you can use States to change the color of each box in addition to changing the color of the Next button after the user clicked the first box. In captivate 8 it was not possible to do use States or Delayed actions natively in Captivate.

Here is the script attached to the first orange box. As you can see, it is applying an effect that the ability to determine the effect duration. In addition, I applied a delay Next Action by the literal value of 2 seconds and after that 2 seconds, I changed the state of the next box and enabled it.

Also the client wanted a reset action so that when the user left the slide and returned the slide would return to the original state, In Captivate 9 responsive and the ability to use States, you can create an On Slide Enter action to change the state and disable (or enable) the buttons you want. SO cool!!!!

3. Preview and Publish 

I can not tell you how many times I have published to SCORM Cloud to test out my courses on an LMS. Now, with Captivate 9, you don't have to have an account to SCORM Cloud, you can preview your course right within Captivate to see how it functions within an LMS. It is free and easy.

Another thing that is really cool is that you can publish directly from Captivate into Captivate Prime, a brand new, amazingly cool LMS. To learn more about the features of Captivate Prime click here.

Josh and James did a fantastic job with the explanation of the other 6 features that were discussed at our Meetup presentation.

To view the full presentation click here

Here is a quick review:

4. SVG: Ability to import responsive SVG (and round trip)
5. Geolocation: Ability to test the location you are using for within the preview GeoLocation
6. States: Ability to create multiple States
7. Effects: Easily preview just by hovering over the effect in the panel and use of the timeline
8. Knowledge Check Questions: Ability to create non-quiz question knowledge check questions
9. Assets: Ability to easily import numerous other free assets from the eLearning brothers.

Another big addition is Adobe Draft: easily create storyboards using the Draft app on your iPad and import into Captivate 9 later. For Mac users there is now an iOS device capture option. 

To test this out: Just Connect your iOS device with Mac using a lightening cable. Launch Adobe Captivate 9. On the Welcome Screen, double-click Device Demo.

There are some other amazing features of Adobe Captivate 9. One of my favorites, all be it small, is that Quiz questions now have their own forward and back button if you allow the user to preview the quiz. Yippee. 

I am presenting at the Adobe Learning Summit on Mastering mLearning and Responsive

And two sessions at DevLearn, one stage session and one concurrent session.  

Also the course was accepted into DemoFest. 

Also a project I assisted with on interactions and responsive design was used as a Case Study for Adobe, see Case Study video here. 

I also teach an online Responsive Design class for Iconlogic.

To go to a set of free video tutorials on how to use many of these new features, go this link on Adobe Knowhow 

I am proud to be part of the Adobe Captivate Community and I am thrilled for the Adobe Captivate team for coming up these innovative solutions and features to make Adobe Captivate even better.

Update: there is a hotfix for some of the bugs, please visit https://helpx.adobe.com/captivate/kb/hot-fix-captivate-9.html to download and for instructions