Trainers Talk Tech

Heads up! The Adobe CS5 Suite is shipping! I have downloaded the trial versions of the CS5 suite for my Mac (reviews coming soon), and am going to be upgrading my client machine to the newly released eLearning Suite 2! (NOTE: It will be released mid-June. I got a little too excited!) Yes, during this last round of upgrades, they created another eLearning Suite and an upgrade to Captivate.

The eLearning Suite 2 contains:

• Captivate 5
• Flash CS5
• Photoshop CS5 Extended
• Dreamweaver CS5
• Presenter 7
• Soundbooth CS5
• Acrobat 9

Interesting that Soundbooth isn't included in the Web suite now, and that Presenter is still version 7. I have a love/hate thing with PowerPoint and eLearning (don't get me started), but I recently created an interactive PDF with Presenter that my client loved so I can't totally hate it.

It's interesting that Adobe didn't upgrade Presenter this round. Makes me wonder if they are going to drop the tool, or more likely, integrate Captivate tools into PPT. Makes you think though...

However, something that I cannot wait to try, is Captivate 5 ON THE MAC. Yes, this is the first iteration of Captivate that runs on a Mac! I really like Captivate and what it can do for certain eLearning projects, and now that it runs on the Mac, it makes me very happy. I'll let you know my opinions of the new Captivate 5 on both the PC and the Mac this month.

Thanks to Adobe for releasing upgrades to products I love to use! Now, if we can just figure out a way to get Apple and Adobe to play nice, my world will be a better place!

If you haven't seen it yet, Adobe has created an eLearning Suite and bundled my favorite software together. It's a really sweet suite:

• Captivate - great for screen capture and for recording software demos. Really good tool and the current version is top notch
• Flash CS4 - great tool, but I'm still fighting with Flash CS4 on the Mac...long story, but nested movie symbols in ActionScript 3.0 movies are slowing down the function of the application...on both Macs...I'm not alone in this, but they are finally elevating my issue...see here, here and here. They are working on it which is encouraging - I trust Adobe will make it right!
• Dreamweaver CS4 - the best coding tool in the world!!!
• Photoshop CS4- the best photo editor in the world, hands down.
• Presenter 7 - Finally available at an affordable price (used to be $1500), this tool lets you use PowerPoint to create eLearning. I'm not a big fan of PowerPoint, so its great news for some, meh for me. However, it works really well Acrobat Connect Pro (formerly Breeze), so if you have that tool, you will love the way Presenter works with it. Note: It works in Office XP, 2003 or 2007. Great news!
• Soundbooth CS4 - create and edit audio...I really, really like this software. It's the first thing that has started pulling me away from Audacity which is an amazing piece of free audio software.

So...my only question...where is Fireworks in the suite? Photoshop rules, but for web distribution, Fireworks has tools that could help the eLearning developer rapidly develop interfaces, convert to PDF and perform lots of cool navigation and button effects. The price point is a little steep ($1799) but worth it if you want to do be able to do everything (no seriously...everything eLearning!) The upgrade price is great ($599) if you have purchased any other suite. I have to say that, overall, I like it quite a bit. There is a lot of software here that can create anything you, the eLearning developer, can think up. However, if you have an extra $299.00 laying around, I'd pick up Fireworks too!

Now...if I can just convince Adobe to fix the Mac bugs in Flash CS4 and give me a version of Captivate for the Mac, I would go back to raving non-stop about their software. I'll rave about everything but Flash CS4, but really, really want to! If Adobe fixes the Flash CS4 bugs, I'll be their biggest evangelist yet! I'll keep running Captivate in Parallels, but it's not the same.