Adobe Captivate 2 is another member of Adobe’s elearning products family. Adobe Captivate enable you to create demos, learning content, screen and product simulations, help content…..etc.

This version of Captivate includes many enhancements comparing with the older version, which was very simple and does not give you all you need. However, you were always looking for other tools to create simple effects such as zooming.

Actually, Adobe Captivate becomes more user friendly with the interesting new features as we will see later. I see the biggest advantage in using Captivate is the integration between it and Flash as well as Adobe Connect. You can export you Captivate file to edit and work in it using either Flash 8 or Flash MX 2004. Also, Adobe connect users can easily publish their captivate projects directly to Adobe Connect server.

So, what’s new? Adobe Captivate includes some cool features; I am arranging them below according to its type and how serve the user.

User Interface enhancements
Now, you can customize your interface the way you like by editing the workspace, either by hiding panels or changing its width using the panel control drag arrow.
Also, the arrangement of the panels and tool bars makes reaching tools much easier and fast than ever (Figure1).

Figure1. Adobe Captivate 2 user interface

Project management and work flow
The new Branching tab moves you to where you can easily navigate your Captivate slides as well as controlling the slides animation flow by providing a tree structure for the Captivate file (Figure2).

Figure2. Adobe Captivate 2 Branching structure

Also, the new adobe Captivate 2 comes up with a library to easily view your project resource and reuse them through slides. Captivate library enable you to export individual project objects, edit content in external software like Adobe Photoshop, as well as the ability to select the unused items in the project.

Creativity enhancement features

In addition to the above features, Adobe Captivate 2 includes some other interesting feature that help improving work and focusing on the content, such as adding the zooming feature, which enable you to focus on specific part of the screen.
Now you can enhance you work with adding Flash video to you project, simply by clicking the Flash Video icon in the bottom tool bar.

Figure3. Adobe Captivate new zooming and Flash Video import feature
Also, you can now choose and customize a full skin to your project, not only a play back controller, but also a menus and borders. You can choose from different types of skins and you can also edit skin colors and style to meet your needs.

Figure4. Adobe Captivate Project Skin editor

On my opinion, these new features and integration in the new Adobe Captivate 2 makes Adobe Captivate the best choice for creating learning content and demos more easily and faster than ever.

You can get Adobe Captivate for US $ 599 and upgrade for US $ 299, and you can find more info about Adobe Captivate 2 on Adobe site at the following link:
http://www.adobe.com/products/captivate/