Lectora Inspire Reviewed

I just got done checking out Lectora Inspire, the latest installment of Lectora by Trivantis. For those familiar with the Lectora product, it's basically Lectora bundled with SnagIt (For basic image capture and editing), Camtasia (For screen recording), and Flypaper (for creating flash-based interactions and animations). I would have loved to see Captivate instead of Camtasia, but in my opinion the inclusion of these additional tools keeps Lectora on my list of must-have's when it comes to e-Learning development tools.

My favorite of the new features has to be Flypaper. I had heard of this application before but never got the opportunity to fiddle with it, until now. I must of spent a good 5 hours at home one evening just playing around with Flypaper and I have to say that it does some pretty cool stuff. It does have a layer of complication associated with it for some things, but overall it makes it very easy to create some pretty slick flash animations and interactions, not to mention that it's a breeze to incorporate anything you create directly into Lectora.

I really like this new version of Lectora and the inclusion of SnagIt, Camtasia and Flypaper, but what I don't like is the cost. I currently have 7 licenses of Lectora 2008 and it would cost me over 11K to upgrade these 7 licenses to Lectora Inspire. I'm not sure my company is gonna front the bill for this so I'm slightly turned off by the high price tag. Other than that though I highly recommend Lectora Inspire.

Lectora still needs to work on their assessment engine (I still use Articulate Quizmaker for all my assessments). Figured I had to crow-bar that in.