would love to hear from successful users of Captivate Responsive 8

I have experimented with it and have run into problems with mobile devices. I find that the gestures are very unreliable (on iOS and Android). For example the double-tap to display the ToC works on Android but not iOS, and playing MP4s is hit and miss (mostly the latter).

I have tested on Connect to rule out our LMS. I can't get Edge Inspect working either.

There is no SWF output for desktop so FireFox users will get the FIrefox warning.

I have reported the issues I have had. It might of course be me but it would be interested to hear from anyone else. It would be good to get it all working.

Hello!  I've had some success with mobile and responsive projects, but feel like that's been because of adhering to the idea of keeping things as foolproof and simple as possible.  For instance, sure, I've got gestures turned on, but am not convinced that people know to touch the little icon of a hand that appears before a presentation starts to view what gestures are available.  Even when putting in my own slide in that explains the gestures, I still feel like I want to offer more traditional, big buttons for people to tap to advance or go back slide by slide.

What I really wanted to comment on was to offer some possible help on getting Edge Inspect working.

1) Install Edge Inspect on your computer, either from the download page (https://creative.adobe.com/products/inspect) or from the Creative Cloud Manager on your computer.

2) Open Chrome.  It HAS to be the Google Chrome browser, NOT Firefox, IE, Safari etc.  Search for and install the Edge Inspect Plug-in. You'll know it's installed when you see a little square with the little Inspect logo (looks like the letters In) in the upper right of your browser, like to the right of your URL bar.

3) For each device you want to test on, download the Edge Inspect app.  So for an iPad/iPhone, search in the App Store for Edge Inspect, for Android, look for Edge Inspect on Google Play.

4) Make sure that your computer and ALL devices you want to test on are connected to the same wireless network.

5)  Have Captivate open and your project up and running

6) Start the Edge Inspect software on your computer (for instance, on PC go to Start menu, then find Edge Inspect).  It will look like nothing has happened.  That's OK.

7)  In Captivate 8, go to the Preview button > In Adobe Edge Inspect. The preview will open in Chrome.  If you click on the Inspect icon on the upper right, it should show 'looking for a connection'

8) Go to your device and start the Edge Inspect app.

9) The computer and the mobile device realize they want to talk to each other.  The first time, you should see a little passcode on your mobile device, it will just come up by itself.  Type that into the box in Inspect icon area in the browser on your computer.  Now the computer and device connect/are paired, your device should then be listed in the browser plug in.  Now you can start the Edge Inspect app on your other devices and connect them too.  Once they've been paired once, usually the browser plug-in seems to remember and you won't have to type in the passcode(s) again in the future.

Now when you start interacting with your Captivate project on your computer, you should see it on your device(s) too.  I have noticed that it looks like just the first screen/slide of my project shows up on the devices.  Even if I navigate forward into the project on the computer, just the first screen still shows on the devices and I have to interact with the project on each device individually to start moving through the project.   When viewing something like a website, this doesn't happen - each time I move to a different page, etc, that new view is shown on my devices.  For a Captivate responsive project, again, it seems like you have to interact with the project individually on each device.   Which in the end seems like not a big deal.

Good luck!

Thanks very much for this information.

The problem with Edge Inspect is that it keeps telling me that the account credentials are incorrect or I do not have access. The solution is to log in and then out of the CC app.

Regarding responsive projects I can only agree: navigation needs to be obvious. Steve Krug is spot on; online people don't read instructions (well no more than a few words), they click/tap/swipe. I devote a slide with instructions (just a few words a screen) but I know this information is often not read from the support messages received.

Now that I have Edge Inspect working I have tested a very basic project (one text slide and two video slides each with an event video (mp4).  This is what I find:

Testing in Edge Inspect

On the  authoring PC in Chrome the ToC works but the stage is blank. So I can't navigate the project on the PC so nothing changes on the mobile devices.  In Firefox the project works (but you can't use Edge Inspect).

The iPad app did not autodiscover the authoring PC so I selected '+' and entered the IP address of the host PC which worked. Using the project on the device does not work as intended: the event videos play but the gestures do not work and you cannot open the ToC.

Android fairs better. On a Nexus 7 gestures do work most of the time but navigation using the ToC is hit and miss (mostly miss).

Connect

This behaviour is the same as that experience when uploading and testing on Connect. I originally tried on our LMS and had problems which is why I tried Connect.

My conclusion is that unless I have done something wrong CP8 responsive projects are unsuitable for production. My test project is really simple and does not work.  Hopefully it is my 'operator error' and I look forward to being corrected!

Well don't know if successful yet but i've been creating courses in CP8 for desktop and mobile...

I find the key is to think mobile upwards and design desktop downwards... and hopefully you can meet in the middle.

The key lowest common demominator is the amount of content you can fit on the mobile screen so work that out and then build upwards with your design.

I also find its best to start simple, and some stuff doesn't work that well. TOCs for example are nearly unusable on touch devices if the TOC needs scrolling, so i've simplified my TOC. Experimentation is also useful and you can't beat testing on real devices.

I like the design philosophy!

I have just heard from Adobe that there is a known issue with the iPad and video; gestures do not work in the responsive projects.

I use video a lot so it looks like delivering responsive projects will have to wait until this is fixed. From my preliminary tests Android is almost there but not quite.

It is good to know that you can determine the playback device in CP8 now so the project can be tailored to this.

I have had mixed results.

Video works fine for me on most platforms (smartphones, tablet, desktop), but I take great pains to encode it correctly to work on ios, android and desktop.

Only exception is firefox, where I get the "captivate doesn't run on firefox" message.

The responsive works pretty well, but what they don't tell you is that is built to display smartphones in portrait mode only.

In landscape, on an iphone for example, parts of the display are off screen and trying to click around brings up either browser header or footer bar which is annoying.

It's really more "adaptive" than "responsive".

I agree about the touch issues and windscorpion has the right ideas on that approach.

For the toc, I also had the problem when it needs to scroll on touch devices.

Ended up building my own toc/progress dashboard in javascript which I attached to the page template so cp adds it automatically when I output to html5.

The end result of designing with cp8 is usable, but I always find that I have to tweak things in captivate to get what I need.

Hope that helps.

You can get rid of the Firefox warning btw, there is a change you can make to the ini file.

We might do our own custom TOC too, i think CP8 works quite well overall though you do have to tweak it a fair bit, i've written a script to process published courses (unzipped) to add web fonts and mobile device autoplay before they get uploaded to the LMS. Hopefully the next version will have better webfont support off the bat.

Very interesting comments. Most of my Captivate projects are simple. They consist of a series of slides each with an MP4 video, with introductory and closing slides (text, images and sometimes audio). Quizzes may also be included. Because a certificate is issued most of the topics (depends on the subject) must be completed and if a quiz is included passed.

Most of our clients use desktops but a growing minority use mobile devices, especially iPads. I did read a post by Rod Ward about server latency and how swfs place a much lower load on an LMS. I was thinking of suppressing the FireFox warning and using just HTML output (I find that only a few minor features do not work in FireFox), but this made me think twice. There is a bug in the current CP8 that duplicates MP4s when outputting to SWF and HTML5 but this will be fixed in the new version. So surely it would be best to have SWF output for desktop and HTML5 for mobile when creating responsive projects?

I need the gestures to work reliably but am really interesting to hear about the customisation with JS. That is another thing I must investigate.

Does anyone know what the issue is with video and the iPad for Cap 8 responsive projects?  On my current project, all the videos run the first time I view the training module, but the 2nd time, some of the videos hang up.  All the videos are .mp4 format progressive downloads.  The browser is Safari with the default settings.

The videos work fine when viewing the module on my PC.  Both machines are accessing the same site that hosts the draft version of the training.  The server is not an LMS, although when the module is on an LMS (where it will ultimately be) the video problem seems even worse.

Any ideas?  Thanks in advance.

I found similar problems and reported them to Adobe. They are working on it.

I'm also having issues playing videos on the iPad. They play fine on my iPhone, but none of my videos play on the iPad. Most are embedded in the project, but one uses the YouTube widget and even that one won't play. Let me know if you find any workarounds.

Got it working on the iPad.with Cap8 Responsive Projects.  Had to remove the videos' soundtrack and put that content into text captions.  It's a work around, kind of like silent movies, but gets the job done for now. 

Rod Ward has some very helpful suggestions under Cap 7 issues and server latency.  Thanks Rod!

Thanks for the ideas!

Videos depend a lot on the platform on which the content is viewed, so some videos might not play in IPad and some in Android devices.

There is already a separate discussion on this mentioned in the post

https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1565325

You can try changing the video encoding before insert in captivate, to make it work on specific devices. 'Adobe Media Encoder' is shipped along with Captivate and is easy to use.

Here are few steps which might help:

    1. Open Adobe Media Encoder.

    2.Click on the + icon on the top right to open the browse window.

    3.Search and open the video to edit.

    4.Change the format for the video to ‘H.264’ from the Format dropdown.

    5.Change the Preset to ‘Android Phone 320 X 240 23.976’ using the dropdown. You can choose a different preset depending on the requirement but this preset works fine for both Android and IOS devices.

    6.Change the output file and folder name by clicking on the link in the output file column.

    7.Click on the Start Queue button to start the conversion.

    8.Use the converted video in captivate project and it should work fine on Android and IOs devices.