Following up last summer’s new version of Captivate, this morning Adobe is releasing three new products for technical communicators, instructional designers, documentation creators, help system authors, and eLearning professionals – and they are RoboHelp 9, FrameMaker 10, and Technical Communication Suite 3. The last of these, TCS 3, is a fully-integrated suite that comprises five major Adobe applications – with the other three components being Captivate 5, Photoshop CS5 and the recent Acrobat X Pro.

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Adobe Captivate 5 has just been released and it’s already been called a “must-have update” by Learning Solutions Magazine… Captivate is Adobe’s industry-leading rapid authoring tool for eLearning solutions, used to create software demonstrations, interactive simulations, branch­ing scenarios, self-running presentations, and randomized quizzes without programming. Perhaps the most notable change with Captivate 5 is Adobe broke from the code history of previous versions to add Mac OS support and in so doing, took the opportunity to completely rearchitect the application from the ground-up – and it clearly shows.

Overall, the performance, interface, and usability improvements from the rewrite make this much more than a simple upgrade, it’s more like a brand new product. The new user interface is similar to the Creative Suite 5 interfaces, and is well-integrated with other recent Adobe tools. And because the product now runs (and works the same) on a Mac – plus uses the same files – you can now create software simulations of Mac applications. You can instantly download a free trial for either platform, although first double-check the minimum system requirements.

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