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Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Macintosh Rapid E-Learning Authoring Software

Is there a rapid elearning or screencasting production tool for the Mac? A contributor to my post Capture that E-Learning Demo: Update, asked me:

We have been looking at both Camtasia and Captivate for our online development. My question is if you have knowledge of ANY Apple compatible capturing software with the same capabilities of Camtasia and Captivate? Or if either Adobe or Techsmith ever plan on making this available to the Apple community?

Two great questions centered around the notion that there is no screencasting killer app for the Mac. Now, I have a Intel-chip MacBook (it also runs Windows using Boot Camp), but I use Windows PCs for learning content development and production – it’s a work / life balance thing. As a result, I have never really considered the options for e-learning authoring on the Mac before now. But since I was asked, here’s my two cents worth…

There are a number of choices. First, you could run the programs you're evaluating (TechSmith Camtasia or Adobe Captivate) on a Mac with Windows / Boot Camp, but my view would be given the processing resources needed to generate content in a native Windows environment, running them via a virtual machine would be to enter a world of pain I’m not prepared to contemplate: there are too many links in the chain; it’s too risky. Murphy’s Law says that on a death march project with a deadline looming, the the authoring environment would not be up to the task, regardless of how well it behaved prior to to that.

With that option rejected let’s look at the other choices available for the MacOS. To answer my correspondent’s second question first, it seems that TechSmith are looking at a mid-2009 release for the Mac version of Camtasia. Click here to view a screencast about the latest developments in this product.

camtasia_4_macCamtasia for the Macintosh is soon to be a reality

Not so good, I’m sad to say for Adobe fans. According to The Apple Blog there are currently no plans to bring it to the Mac. When questioned, the Adobe development team responded:

Captivate is built from a program that ties deeply into the core Windows. To bring it to the Mac would require a total rewrite, something that we’re not sure we can justify at this point. If we had significant interest from Mac users, it’d be a different story.

If you want to register your interest in a Mac version of Captivate, click here to let Adobe know via their feature request form.

Next, the third of the "Big Three" rapid e-learning development authoring tools, Articulate similarly does not support MacOS natively. However, in a very comprehensive post here, guest blogger Jim Gritton (co-founder of GB Learning Consultancy) discusses

Parallels Desktop for Mac, followed by CrossOver Mac and now VMware Fusion. Both Parallels and Fusion are Windows emulators: they use virtualization technology to allow you to run Windows as a virtual machine alongside the Mac operating system, as you can see from the screenshot below:
WinXP login screen on Parallels

While it may seem contradictory that I discuss an emulator here, Articulate is a little different, in that it can interact with Mac-native KeyNote-created presentations and even integrates with the Mac Dock (via Parallels).

Obviously more optimistic than me (see Death March above) Jim asserts that:

If you’re wondering about my set-up, I’m currently running Parallels Desktop with Windows XP on a 20-inch, all-in-one iMac, sporting a 2.16 GHz Intel Core Duo Processor, 1 GB memory and a 240 GB hard disk. This isn’t the fastest or most powerful Mac on the block, but it isn’t the slowest, either. I’m not going to pretend that running Windows applications using Parallels is as fast as running Mac applications natively on my iMac, but it’s no slouch. Nor has it let me down.
One approach that seems to me to have some potential is CrossOver Mac, which builds on the open-source implementation of the Windows API, Wine. This enables Unix-based operating systems (like Mac OS X and Linux) to run Windows applications “natively.” Hmmm... might look in to this myself, but it breaks my "Macs are for fun" work / life balance rule, in a thin-end-of-the-wedge kind of way...

What are we left with? Quite a lot, as it turns out.

In terms of native MacOS screencasting Mac, the evidence of my research suggests that Telestream’s ScreenFlow is the most popular application.

screenflow

ScreenFlow Export wizard screenshot

According to their website ScreenFlow includes:

Feature Description

Video Capture

Using a custom multithreaded SSE & Altivec accelerated, 64-bit enabled compression system, ScreenFlow can handle everything from capturing DVD video & audio to fast moving Keynote presentations.

Record Everything

You don't need to pick an area of the screen for capture, ScreenFlow has advanced algorithms that only encode areas of change on your screen. The application is powerful enough to simultaneously record from your iSight or DV camera at the same time as your screen (and your microphone and computer's audio!).

Highlight

During your screen capture, ScreenFlow tracks where your mouse cursor is, when you click and when you press a key. This allows you to add mouse click effects (both visual and audible), an overlay showing your key strokes and even lets you zoom the mouse pointer up & down.

Edit

Once your screen capture is complete, you're transported to the ScreenFlow editor. Using a familiar timeline interface, ScreenFlow lets you easily add zoom & pan effects, trim clips, add drop shadow & reflection, adjust audio levels etc. You can even combine existing media into your screencast.

Callout

Callouts let you highlight & focus in on the mouse or front-most window. Want to circle the area around the mouse? What took an experienced user minutes or hours in Final Cut Pro or After Effects is now a couple of clicks away.

Motion

ScreenFlow introduces actions to the editing interface. These make it very quick & easy to modify parameters of your screencast over time. For example, adding a video action lets you put zoom & pan effects on your clips, while the audio action lets you adjust volume at different points in your screencast.

Export Quality

When resizing high resolution screen content into a QuickTime movie, ScreenFlow uses custom GPU algorithms to give your finished movie the best possible quality. You'll find even small text suddenly becomes legible for your viewers.

Leopard Only

ScreenFlow was built for Mac OS X Leopard. It makes extensive use of the best of Mac OS X technologies: Core Animation, QuickLook, Spotlight, QTKit, Quartz Composer, OpenGL, Core Image, Automator, Core Data and many others.


In the multiplatform world, Qarbon’s offering ViewletBuilder seems to have potential. This product seems to have some powerful e-learning features including LMS integration.

ViewletBuilder Qarbon’s ViewletBuilder

According to Qarbon, the product’s highlights are:

  • Create and publish Flash tutorials and simulations in minutes
  • Expand the reach of your online marketing with interactive slideshows and presentations
  • Develop and deliver powerful, dynamic courseware without programming
  • Capture detailed viewer responses with quizzes, tests, surveys and polls
  • Seamlessly share Projects amongst Authors
  • Integrate your content with your organization’s learning management system (LMS)
  • Benefit from its multi-platform solutions Windows, Linux & Mac

From the open source world SWF Tools is also available for the Mac. SWF Tools is a collection of SWF manipulation and creation utilities written by Rainer Böhme and Matthias Kramm. It is released under the GPL.
Features included are:

  • PDF2SWF A PDF to SWF Converter. Generates one frame per page. Enables you to have fully formatted text, including tables, formulas etc. inside your Flash Movie. It's based on the xpdf PDF parser from Derek B. Noonburg.
  • SWFCombine A tool for inserting SWFs into Wrapper SWFs. (Templates) E.g. for including the pdf2swf SWFs in some sort of Browsing-SWF.
  • SWFStrings Scans SWFs for text data.
  • SWFDump Prints out various informations about SWFs.
  • JPEG2SWF Takes one or more JPEG pictures and generates a SWF slideshow.
  • PNG2SWF Like JPEG2SWF, only for PNGs.
  • GIF2SWF Converts GIFs to SWF. Also able to handle animated gifs.
  • WAV2SWF Converts WAV audio files to SWFs, using the L.A.M.E. MP3 encoder library.
  • AVI2SWF Converts AVI animation files to SWF. It supports Flash MX H.263 compression. Some examples can be found at examples.html.
    Font2SWF Converts font files (TTF, Type1) to SWF.
  • SWFBBox Allows to readjust SWF bounding boxes.
  • SWFC A tool for creating SWF files from simple script files.
  • SWFExtract Allows to extract Movieclips, Sounds, Images etc. from SWF files.
  • RFXSWF Library A fully featured library which can be used for standalone SWF generation. Includes support for Bitmaps, Buttons, Shapes, Text, Fonts, Sound etc. It also has support for ActionScript using the Ming ActionCompiler.

SWFTools has been reported to work on Solaris, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, HP-UX, MacOS X and Windows 98/ME/2000/XP/Vista.

If you want to experiment with a ‘lite’ authoring environment for the Macintosh, try free-to-use Jing (by TechSmith).

  • Screenshot still image capturejing
  • Record onscreen video
  • Share instantly over the Web (FTP), IM, e-mail
  • Audio Narration

Jing lacks many features that proprietary screencasting software has, including local saves, multiple output types, and delivery formats, but it’s free to use, so a restricted function set should be expected. Once content is captured and saved, a URL for the file is automatically created and can be shared with others to view or access.

So there you have it. A whistle-stop tour of content capture and rapid e-learning authoring tools for the Mac. I would be very interested to hear how Mac users fare with these applications, or can suggest any others that are used in this context on the MacOS platform. What really surprises me is that there aren’t more tools already, after all, the Mac is the doyen of the digital media development industry and I would have thought that the tools available for e-learning development would reflect this preference for the platform. But that’s another story.

NOTE WELL:

Given the number of positive comments I have made about TechSmith recently, I want to emphasize that I am in no way associated with them, and that the purpose of this blog is not to showcase or cheerlead any commercial interest. It just happens at the moment they seem to make the most effective tools in this market space. I would suggest to their competitors that they step up to the mark and compete with applications that really meet the needs of learning and development practitioners and I will certainly be pleased to discuss their solutions in positive terms. Equally, should anyone fall short of the mark (MPEG4 or FLV, anyone?) I will highlight it on the E-Learning Curve Blog with no prejudice.

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2 comments:

Matthew said...

Great article, thanks Michael.

This post prompted me to blog about my experience in using Captivate CS4 on a Mac.

For full details see here: http://www.matthewbibby.com/blog/captivate-cs4-on-a-mac/

Cheers,

Matt.

Garin Hess said...

Your reads may also want to know about our online rapid course authoring system Unison. It publishes to Flash as well on a mac via the browser (Firefox or Safari) as it does on a PC. You can check it out at http://www.rapidintake.com/products/unison/collaborative-rapid-elearning-authoring-tools/