What do you think of Windows Surface tablet?

Frankly, I’m getting pretty excited about it. I’ve read in a few places that the Surface tablet will be like the Surface ‘table’ computer in that it will be able to ‘see’ what it placed on it. If you’ve never seen any of the Surface demos on YouTube, you should go peek now.

I showed this iPad vs Windows 8 (beta) tablet to a colleague and some friends. There are some pretty compelling new features, reminiscent of a conglomeration of WebOS and other tablets that make my wallet nervous …

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Techsmith Camtasia Studio 8

Techsmith quietly released Camtasia Studio 8 last week.

Camtasia Studio 8 gains a more complex interface as great new features are added.

I am a big Camtasia fan, so I’ve just downloaded Studio 8 and taken a quick look and I see several things that are exciting:-

• Grouping objects on the timeline
• The ability to replace video on the video layer with an image and then zoom the image, same as zooming video (Used to be able to do this with video or image, but not both combined in the same project)
• Motion animations
• Smartplayer – bringing interactive Camtasia projects to iOS at last

Since Captivate and Camtasia are close competitors, it is easy to see why certain features are similar in each, but until now I thought that Captivate 6 was going to be an easy choice for video-only demos. However, this latest release from Techsmith has me certain that I will still want to use both products.

Exciting Times

But I suspect I will not be saying this for long. With Captivate’s new subscription model allowing more regular updates, I hope to see new features in CP6 dot releases that enable Captivate to quickly leapfrog Camtasia.

It has been a few years since Adobe/Macromedia’s software releases have generated such a buzz in the Community. The new subscription model has the potential to be both disruptive and stimulating for software users in all sorts of industries.

Camtasia for Mac

Confession: I have been aware of Camtasia 2 for Mac for some time, and even own a license for it but I did not install it until now. It looks like Camtasia Studio 8 for Windows and Camtasia 2.2 for Mac do not have feature parity right now, though I have to do some more research to be certain.

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Adobe has released Captivate 6

On Friday June 15th, Adobe released Captivate 6. This latest version of Captivate has some major new features, including the ability to publish to HTML 5 (concurrently with Flash publishing), a new Video Project, massively improved PowerPoint import and integration, interactive widgets, powerful themes and much more.

If you are heading out for mLearnCon in San Jose on June 19th, I’ll be there talking about the Video Demo workflow with Pooja Jaisingh, one of Adobe’s eLearning Evangelists.

Adobe has published a lot of Captivate 6 feature demos on AdobeTV, and I recommend you take a few minutes to browse them.

Here are some quick Captivate 6 resources:

AdobeTV: What’s new in Adobe Captivate 6

Leive Weymeis (Lilybiri): Captivate 6 – Advanced Actions

 

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