Adobe Captivate

In the end, I decided to implement my eLearning package with Adobe Captivate. The most compelling reason was that I didn't have an existing SCORM-capable platform. No existing project to use as a template or anything. And clearly, because this seemed like a one-off case, I didn't take the time to develop a new DHTML-based presentation from scratch.

Right now, it looks like Captivate was the decisive factor for the project's technical success. Yes, I ended up doing a lot of duplicate work (like adjusting the visuals for each question slide separetely). Yes, sometimes I had to say "this is not possible" to the client. Especially the restrictions on question slides pissed me off a lot. But still, I don't believe that the project would have been completed in schedule without Captivate.

Captivate links:

• Adobe Captivate SCORM articls
• Captivate Forums
• RaisingAimee Flash Add-ons. These are great!
  

Pros:

• It is fast to react to the changing client requirements.
• Flash add-ons are available! They really add the needed flexibility to the platform.
• No usual CSS or JavaScript worries
  

Cons:

• Captivate is a high-level tool. Unfortunately, it's toolset is not sufficient enough to implement even very basic requirements. You will find out many restrictions that you'll have to live with or...
• You will have to patch missing tools with Flash add-ons (e.g. page count, printing)
• SCORM-compliancy is pretty much restricted to a single project. You can't divide your eLearning to multiple projects and combine them in a SCORM-compliant way. This is a serious restriction because skins are project-specific. If you want a different skin for some slides you need to create a separate project for it.
  
• Bugs. Publishing and preview do not always work. You cant really trust buttons to provide navigation. Sometimes they just don't work, presumably because of Flash timing issues.
• Debugging is hard. Usually this is caused by the fact that you don't see the playhead when moving across slides.
• No direct control of the playhead! You can stop things with interaction controls like buttons and text boxes. But forget jumping back in the playhead.
• Rollover and button controls cannot be stacked. Only with rollover slidelet you can have both click and onhover effects. But rollover slidelet always shows a separate (fake) window with close window control. Why?
  
• Default animated controls (rollovers, animated text) are lame. You need Flash to jazz up your animations.
• Flash export does not really work. Don't count on it to fine-tune your presentation