Captivate is the first real “overhaul” of the initial product. Once items such as the click box issue are eradicated, RoboDemo/Captivate will definitely provide the best value on the market for what it does.

For those seeking extremely high-level performance, you still can’t beat Authorware. Many companies, unfortunately, aren’t interested in investing the $3K per license for that application.

At any rate, just thought someone would be interested in some additional history on the product.

Case in point: I appreciate your correction on 5.0 being a pre-Macromedia release. (It’s possible that Jim, above, was trying to tell me the same thing and that I misunderstood his comment.) Regarding the pause error I mentioned, though, I feel pretty confident about it. We reproduced it on several authoring machines and the Macromedia help desk acknowledged it as a known issue. (Well…they acknowledged it as a known behavior, anyway.) I can’t guess why it happened for us and not for you.

Your information regarding the history of the eLearning edition are interesting. It’s been clear to me that auto-capture RoboDemo is intended to compete with epiplex and OnDemand, both of which have far more advanced and polished capture functionality (epiplex moreso than OnDemand) that cut down authoring times by an order of magnitude. Of course, these products are both also an order of magnitude more expensive. Auto-capture is hard; it doesn’t surprise me that eHelp broke some things when they tried to implement it. Maybe Captivate will get it right.

On the third point, I think your added information only serves to reinforce my position. The authoring file format is less important than the fact that the end product is an SWF file. However eHelp was manipulating data within their own file format, they could only output in the ways that Flash let them. As far as I am aware, this is the only output format RoboDemo has supported, which leads me to surmose that their developers would logically be thinking quite a bit about how Flash works when they built their own product. (They would have been stupid not to do so.) I don’t know when RoboDemo 5 came out in relation to Flash 5 and 6 (and I’m not about to speculate), but the fact that there now exists a way in Flash to deal easily with sound syncronization today doesn’t mean that (a) it existed when Robodemo 5 was created or that (b) even if it did exist it would have been easy for the eHelp developers to extend their own (proprietary) authoring system to take advantage of it. We just don’t know how hard it is to refactor their code to take advantage of newer developments in Flash (which, by the way, is one reason why we can hope that Macromedia owning the product will mean that it can keep better pace with new Flash functionality in the future).

My point wasn’t to cast aspersions on the current state of Flash and ActionScript. It was merely to point out that, when you build your product with heavy dependencies on a third-party platform, you end up being tied to the way of thinking encouraged by what the platform snapshot affords at the time of your initial development. Untying that knot is often a lot easier said than done.

That said, I think your review of RoboDemo is wrong in some of its basic assumptions, overly harsh and uncharacteristically naive about the workings of the software industry.

Regarding your first suspected reason for your problems with RoboDemo: RoboDemo 5 was a product developed and released in October 2003 by eHelp Corp. Macromedia completed its acquisition of eHelp in December 2003. Until summer 2004, if you tried to purchase RoboDemo 5 from Macromedia’s site, you were forwarded to an online store at ehelp.com. Even today, if you open up the Help|About window, you will see the copyright, support address and website all point to eHelp sites. (These now forward to Macromedia.com, although the old forums are still available as read-only at http://robodemo-forums.helpcommunity.ehelp.com/phpbb2/) Blaming Macromedia for a rushed release is therefore, inappropriate. Version 6, now known as Captivate, is the first fully Macromedia-ized version, and I believe it has been rewritten from the ground up to address many of the issues reported in earlier incarnations.

As for your experience with the “Pause movie until user clicks” setting: I can’t duplicate that. If I capture a short demo, insert a “click box” into the movie with the default settings, upon playback the movie automatically pauses and waits until I click the click area before continuing. Perhaps I am not understanding your description of the problem correctly.

As to your second suspicion, this may be closer to the mark. RoboDemo was, indeed originally intended purely as demo software. With version 4 of the program, eHelp released 2 levels of the program: Standard, and the more expensive eLearning Edition. The eLearning features were added on to the base program; in the version 5 release, the two levels were merged. Many of the problems encountered by you and other users with regard to timing issues are due to the poorly-designed “auto-capture” feature. Many of the comments on the old eHelp forums advised users to capture demos manually rather than using the automatic mode. It seems that Captivate will include some of these automation features.

For your third scenario, you are a little mistaken: RoboDemo was not built on the Flash platform. It uses its own proprietary file format and development paradigm. It merely exports to Macromedia’s .SWF format in the same way that it exports to Word format. If you want to export the .RD file to a file usable by Flash, you need to buy an add-on called the “FLA export module” which performs the complex format conversions. Captivate includes .FLA export in its standard features, leading me to believe that there is more Flash functionality in the new product — a good thing, in my opinion. It is true that originally Flash was designed “…to move objects around on a screen following a timeline.” However, since the addition of the full-fledged programming language, ActionScript, in version 5, language enchancements in version 6 (MX), and a completely new, fully object-oriented version 2 in MX 2004, the timeline has become less and less central to Flash’s development paradigm. Flash MX 2004 Professional offers a development environment which completely eschews the timeline for a form-based IDE akin to Microsoft’s VisualBasic.

Accordingly, your criticisms of Flash’s sound capabilities left me somewhat perplexed. I think you should tell the Flash developer you consulted to review the documentation on Flash’s “Sound” class. It was introduced in Flash 5, then revised and made much more useful in Flash 6. Specifically, have him or her take a look at the “Sound.onSoundComplete()” event handler. (The name should give him or her a hint about what it does.) Even without the sound object, it is very easy to design an animation which stops the main timeline and relies on a sound-containing independent movieclip to un-pause the main movie when it finishes playing. We’ve been doing this since version 4. I strongly suspect that any problems RoboDemo has with syncing sounds have nothing to do with Flash.

I realize I’ve gone on at length here, and I apologize if I’ve rambled, but I read your site regularly in my newsreader and I have come to respect and enjoy your writing and opinions on so many aspects of our industry. I hope my rambling may have helped you in some small way with your “learning about online learning.”

Glad to hear you’re happy with Viewletbuilder and thanks for the examples.

I’d also like to point out some pretty advanced tutorials our Learning Commons put together using ViewletBuilder – http://elearn.ucalgary.ca/tutorials/blackboard/

Can you show us what you ended up with with RoboDemo, or did you just abandon the project?

By the way, I want to be clear that RoboDemo isn’t so bad that it’s unusable. Furthermore, I’m not aware of any product in its price category that’s a whole lot better (though I’ve heard good things about Camtasia). If you just need a tool to pump out a dozen short lessons on how to use, say, your course management system, it would probably be OK–especially if you’re viewing those lessons more as online “show me” help rather than “guide me” and “test me” certification. But it’s enough of a pain to author in that I wouldn’t use it for larger training projects.

Thanks for your review, though. I’ve thought about investigating it more closely as a possible tool for online tutorials for faculty and students. Sounds like it might be worth waiting for Captivate–I’ll certainly wait for your review of that!

-Jim