After years of requests from passionate Mac & Captivate users, Adobe have made it known that they are working on Captivate for Mac!

I noticed this tweet from RJ Jacquez who is the Senior Product Evangelist at Adobe yesterday and it looks like the Mac version of Captivate will enter beta testing in a few months time.

This is a great step for Adobe, however it looks like TechSmith may win a few hearts before then with their release of Camtasia for Mac (they are beta testing as we speak.)

I use Captivate CS4 on my Macbook through Fusion, however the problem with this approach is that I can only record what is happening in the Windows session.  For recording Mac applications I have been using ScreenFlow which is a very impressive program however it not really comparable to Captivate or Camtasia.

My hope . . . that Captivate for Mac .cp files will be 100% compatible with the Windows version of Captivate CS4.

What features do you hope Captivate for Mac includes?

What do you think the work flow will be like?

Thanks for listening Adobe.

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Enter Xtranormal, the “If you can type you can make movies” people.

xtranormal is different. They are easy to use.

Seriously, check it out.

A demonstration of how to create movies in xtranormal:

The finished product:

As far as customer service goes, xtranormal rock.  Not only does @xtranormal provide real time updates on any site developments or hiccups, they are also fantastic to deal with via their contact form.

So, xtranormal is a great tool to have in the toolkit. It is part of the puzzle for the branching scenario idea discussed at the beginning of this post . . . next time I have a spare hour or two  </laugh> I will show how to bring it all together in Adobe Captivate CS4 (yes, on a Mac!).

If you have any suggestions on the topic or storyline for this presentation then leave a note in the comments.

Then go and see the guru of branching scenarios, Tom @ The Rapid E-Learning Blog.

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Look, DeskTube is great program. I love it.

What really amazed me was the level of service that came with it’s $0 price tag.

Here is how it went:

* I downloaded DeskTube
* I liked it a lot, so I tweeted about it
* DeskTube then followed me on twitter and thanked me
* DeskTube also provided an email address for feedback
* I emailed them saying that the playlist function didn’t work . . .
* The problem was fixed and an update released in under 24 hours!

I felt like a truly valued customer, thanks Damon.

Do yourself a favour, download DeskTube.

Here is a video I put together showing how great DeskTube is, for more info on all of the features go to http://thedesktube.com:

The video featured at the end is: Mankind is No Island – a truly amazing piece of art.

Oh, and make sure you check out this post by eQuixotic to see the story behind this postcard from Bee Docs Timeline.

Have you recently received some wonderful service from an Indie Software developer?  Tell us about it and thank them by promoting their products.

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Michael Hanley recently wrote on The E-Learning Curve Blog about Macintosh Rapid E-Learning Authoring Software.  In his post Michael shares his thoughts on running Captivate on a Mac using a Virtual Windows installation:

There are a number of choices. First, you could run the programs you’re evaluating (TechSmith Camtasia or Adobe Captivate) on a Mac with Windows / Boot Camp, but my view would be given the processing resources needed to generate content in a native Windows environment, running them via a virtual machine would be to enter a world of pain I’m not prepared to contemplate: there are too many links in the chain; it’s too risky. Murphy’s Law says that on a death march project with a deadline looming, the the authoring environment would not be up to the task, regardless of how well it behaved prior to to that.

I played around with a couple of native Mac options for screencasting (ScreenFlow & Jing, which are both reviewed in Michael’s article) however I quickly decided that while both applications were good, and each had strong points (e.g. ScreenFlow’s effects or Jing’s integrations with ScreenCast.com) – at the end of the day I can’t live without Captivate.

I had the foresight to order a copy of VMware Fusion when I bought my Macbook, so on day three of my Mac ownership I installed a trial of Windows Vista through Fusion and tried to use that virtual machine to run Captivate.  It failed miserably.  I was really dissapointed at how slowly programs loaded, files were saved and previews generated.  It also caused issues with the performance of OSX, especially when using Spaces.  My suspicion was that these performance issues were related to how much memory Vista uses, and the fact that I was only allowing Vista to access 1GB of RAM.

I quickly uninstalled the Vista installation, the whole experiment taking me just over an hour.

I then installed XP SP2.  One of the great features of Fusion is that it installs all of the necessary drivers so when Windows is up and running you don’t need to spend hours getting the internet working, the sound card configured etc.  You can also decided at the press of a button which devices Windows has access too, blocking or allowing access to all inbuilt and peripheral devices (bluetooth, external hard drive etc.)

XP ran like a dream, like I expected it should given the technology in this laptop.  I installed Adobe Captivate CS4 and started on a major recording project for work.

I ran Captivate alongside native Mac applications for four days while I recorded demonstrations on how to use a web application.  I found that while there where benefits for using Fusions Unity view (such as copy and paste between operating systems) that XP ran a little smoother when it was working in full screen.

One of the downsides of Captivate is that it only records within the Windows environment.  To give you an idea of how quickly Captivate CS4 works in a Virtual Windows environment, I have recorded the following movie using ScreenFlow:

One thing that I tried to demonstrate in that video is how easy it is to share files between the operating systems.  Simply drag them into a shared folder and they can be opened and edited in either XP or OSX.

The other feature that I find reassuring is the ability to take ‘Snapshots’ of your virtual operating system at any time (it takes about 30 seconds).  This means that if you ever have a deadline looming and your virtual environment crashes (or gets a virus) then you can rollback to a known good version and continue working.  This ‘rollback’ takes a couple of minutes, all of your original files will be intact (because they are stored outside of the virtual machine), it is certainly pain-free when compared to restoring a windows PC from scratch.

While using Captivate in a virtual environment is workable, it would obviously be preferable to have a native Mac version to use.  Please let Adobe know how important it is to you that they develop Captivate for Mac.

Do you develop eLearning on a Mac?

What software do you use?

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