Captivate 5 in an Engage Activity

Mar 03, 2011

I have a Captivate 5 .swf file that I want to include in an Engage activity. When I publish it the Captivate file plays crazy with a box flashing and the .swf flashes uncontrollably. I know that when you publish Captivate 5 to Presenter you need to do it as as a web object. But how can you get a Captivate 5 .swf file published to Engage?

Thanks!

51 Replies
P-O E

What happens with the issue with Captivate and Flash CS5 due to AS3?

In our company where we are ramping up the use of eLearning world wide, but we will perhaps need to leave Articulate and start to work with Adobe Presenter instead. Articulate is better in many ways (!!) but we need to have it compatible with Captivate. And without concrete information we cannot rely on that Articulate will be able to address this.

Regards,

P-O

Brian Batt

Hi P-O and welcome to Heroes,

Quizmaker and Engage aren't compatible with Captivate 5's output.  However, there are several workarounds for importing the content into Presenter using web objects:

http://www.articulate.com/support/presenter09/kb/?p=2903

In regards to future support for AS3, we're unable to comment on future releases.  If you'd like to see AS3 support added, please submit a feature request to us by using the link below:

http://www.articulate.com/support/contact/feature/

P-O E

Hi Brian,

'Thank you for your reply. As usual, all you in the  Articulate team are extremely good in quick customer support.

When it comes to the issue itself, I am not that satisfied. I have seen the link with the workaround. That solution falls on the fact that we want to run the produced programs locally sometimes and then we need to use Explorer.

Articulates success story has been that it is so versatile and yet easily to use. If you start to rely on workarounds that incluedes coding and that might or might not work for central features, that might change the story.

I also used the link for feature request. But I hope that your actions concerning this issue doesn't depend on statistics from that service.

Gabe Anderson

P-O E said:

Hi Brian,

'Thank you for your reply. As usual, all you in the  Articulate team are extremely good in quick customer support.

When it comes to the issue itself, I am not that satisfied. I have seen the link with the workaround. That solution falls on the fact that we want to run the produced programs locally sometimes and then we need to use Explorer.

Articulates success story has been that it is so versatile and yet easily to use. If you start to rely on workarounds that incluedes coding and that might or might not work for central features, that might change the story.

I also used the link for feature request. But I hope that your actions concerning this issue doesn't depend on statistics from that service.


Thanks for the feedback. We don't make product feature decisions based on the volume of particular requests, if that's what you mean. We do read every request, and we take requests into consideration for future product features and enhancements. We also like to continue leading the industry forward with new innovation.

Though we can't comment on the specifics of unreleased features, I think you'll find that we have a pretty good track record of responding to customer input.

P-O E

Hi Gabe,

Actually, I can only be greatful to Articulate that has made the feasible tools available during the years. And the products have been very affordable. To utilize the Artifculate tools,  companies that I have been working with have made a lot of investments in work flows around them.

Now when central features in Articulate äffected by changes in third parties technology is not met (for quite a while), we as customers to Artuculate have to start to think outside the box again to look for other ways to work. I am sorry if some of the frustration came out a bit rude in my last post, but I do think that I. as a customer, is not alone in this situation.

One way to work with this, as I think, big problem would be to communicate a bit more around it. In the past, your strategy not to communicate around unreleased new innovations, has proven to lead to success, while you have released NEW innovations that have taken the market by storm. But the issue here is a REMEDY for a situation where your products are not working as they are supposed to do. 

Gabe Anderson

Hi P-O E-

Thanks for the additional feedback, and glad to hear you like our products. I think it's a stretch, though, to say that our "products are not working as they are supposed to." The only thing we're talking about here is ActionScript 3, which we've never claimed to support. If you were having issues with AS2, that would be a different story...

That said, we know that there's a strong desire to see our products support AS3, so we definitely hear you and understand where you're coming from.

Until we're able to offer native AS3 support in our products, the best solution we can offer is the Web Object embedding for Captivate 5.

Gabe Anderson

P-O E said:

I am happy that you acknowledge the strong desire concerning AS3. Keep on communicate around that. I would call it an important product feature. The function Insert Flash depends on todays standard AS3, doesn't it?


Thanks again for the feedback. This feature supports incorporating Flash .FLV, Flash .SWF, and QuickTime .MP4 formats into your Articulate projects. It does not currently support AS3, as we make clear in our Knowledge Base. Beyond that, I can't debate interpretation of a feature name with you.

We can only tell you how particular features work, and we accurately advertise them as such.

P-O E

Of course, you cannot debate with me how your company choses to communicate around different issues. But when the communication strategy is chosen not to acknowledge that there is a problem with Articulate for the customers that is not solved, then you will get reactions on that.

But as I have tried to come through with aswell, I can only rely on that Articulate takes the issue seroiusly and hope for a remidy for the problem so that we in our company still can choose to use Articulate, which is what all this is about. It is not what you choose to communicate that makes Articulate the best choice, it is all about performance...

Jon Jessup

I work with Captivate, Flash, and Articulate every day.  As a Flash developer I know the coding differences bewteen AS2 and AS3 are huge.  None of my AS2 scripts work in AS3.  I can definitely appreciate what a big task it would be to make Articulate work with AS3.  Unfortunately for Articulate... Adobe eLearning Suite is all CS5 and comes with Adobe Presenter.  Captivate 5 will only write AS3 files.  This leaves Articulate in a bad spot (probably something Adobe intended).  I would much rather use Articulate as Presenter seems rather rudimentary and unfinished.  Unfortunately, I need to keep up with technology.  I need to move on to AS3.  If Articulate doesn't support it then I'll have to move on from Articulate as well. 

I would love to see Articulate reworked to accept AS3 files.  Just thought I throw my two cents in.

Jon Jessup

By the way... I forgot to add this... for those people who are looking to move to Adobe Presenter, keep in mind that the current version of Presenter doesn't accept Flash 3 either.  I find this rather ridiculous.  Adobe eLearning Suite comes bundled with Captivate 5 and Presenter 7.  Captivate 5 only exports AS3.  Presenter only accepts AS2.  How can you bundle programs in a suite when they don't even work together?

Hopefully this will all be worked out soon.

Brian Batt

Jon Jessup said:

By the way... I forgot to add this... for those people who are looking to move to Adobe Presenter, keep in mind that the current version of Presenter doesn't accept Flash 3 either.  I find this rather ridiculous.  Adobe eLearning Suite comes bundled with Captivate 5 and Presenter 7.  Captivate 5 only exports AS3.  Presenter only accepts AS2.  How can you bundle programs in a suite when they don't even work together?

Hopefully this will all be worked out soon.


I didn't realize that the latest version of Adobe Presenter didn't accept ActionScript 3 files.  It makes me feel good knowing that we have the web object solution to accommodate output from Captivate 5.

Christian Schett

I share your opinion about working on AS3-support in all Articulate Studio products, Jon, and hope you're voice will be heard.

@eLearning Suite: I think Adobe isn't very interrested in developing forward Presenter 7 (it's the same as in ELS 1 and the same as in times before ELS, only the support for Powerpoint 2010 is new). Maybe they will push the functionality of importing Powerpoint into Captivate X and remove Presenter from the Suite - who knows.

Fact is that for a useful workaround between Flash, Captivate (and all other flash-based tools) and Articulate a AS3-support is indispensible in future.

regards from Austria

The land where people produce bad english

Christian Schett

What I meant with update is this:

"Adobe Presenter has been updated to enable installation on a computer havingMicrosoft® PowerPoint 2010."

Adobe Presenter 7 is at least from 2008 (even before ELS 1.0).

Anyway - I didn't want to talk about Adobe, I'm only interested in AS3 support in - hopefully - Articulate Studio 11 (Presenter, Quizmaker AND Engage). Not more, not less

Jon Jessup

Thanks for the posts.  I have eLearning Studio 1 and 2.  Yep... they both came with Adobe Presenter 7.  Unfortunately, I'm running Office 2007 and getting the company to upgrade the whole team to 2010 is about as likely as catching a leprechaun.

Thanks for the link about using web objects Brian.  That will have to do for now.  I tested it and was able to use my AS3 files created in Captivate 5.  Basically, all I had to do was publish the SWF and HTML files from Captivate 5.  I also opened the skin editor in Captivate and turned off "Show Playback Controls" so they wouldn't appear on the HTML page.  Then I added the web object and pointed it to the HTML page.  It worked fine.  I also found that if you add the link to the HTML file yourself, you can make it a relative link rather than the absolute link generated by Articulate.  That way you can run your presentation files locally on your machine and upload the same files to the web without having the links break.  You just need to make sure that you add your HTML and SWF files to your presentation folder after Articulate publishes.

Thanks for the info.  Happy St. Patrick's Day and cheers everyone.

Sue McKibben

I am also hoping  Articulate will get AS3 files to work in Engage and Presenter.  I am looking at Articulate as a solution since Adobe's elearning suite 2 bundles Presenter 7 and Captivate 5 together - and the two products are incompatible.  I spent many hours trying to determine what I was doing wrong, since I couldn't believe a company would bundle incompatible products together - however Adobe tech support told me "just because we bundle applications together does NOT mean they are compatible with one another" How foolish on my part to think better of them!

Anyway, I saw the work-around for AS3 and Presenter, however , I did not see the option to use a web object in Engage (want to insert a movie in the glossary).  Am I correct that the web object work around is only good for Presenter and AS3 and will NOT work for Engage.

In the meantime, please, Articulate, make AS3 compatible with your products - Adobe seems to have no plans to do this, so I would love to see you jump ahead of them!  

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