I had the pleasant surprise to finally see my widget published on the Captivate Exchange yesterday. After my last rant on the Exchange, Micheal also created a post about the same subject. While mine got little attention, his hit the spot. Suresh, the Sr. QE manager  for the Captivate & E-learning suite, promised to update the Exchange and better yet, to make sure that widgets would never go beyond 4 weeks in the queue. So, Suresh did stand by his words and cleared the Exchange queue. Now developers will have their window for exposing their work. Thanks Suresh for making the commitment!

Remember a few months ago (3 to be more exact), I blogged that I published my Interactive Label Widget on the Adobe Captivate Exchange. Well, after 9 months of inactivity, Adobe finally decided to published new widgets on it. Yeah! That was what I thought so until I realized that they only published a handful of widgets and that my mine wasn’t one of them.

I suspect that they went and upgraded the exchange only to publish their own Twitter widget. They also published about 5 other widgets, most of them belonging to Micheal over at www.cpguru.com. I’m sure that they wouldn’t have published any other widgets if Michael wasn’t such an exceptional contributor to the Captivate platform.

So, at the end, I’m slowly starting to think that the Captivate Exchange is a joke. The Captivate community will grow and the tool become more powerful as developers start creating widgets. Without a window to expose their work, developers will not be interested into putting more time to create widgets. It is very sad that Adobe doesn’t see this. It doesn’t require a lot of man power to keep the site up to date and publish new widgets every 2 to 4 weeks.

Honestly, I was expecting more from the Exchange with the Cp5 release. I wrote to Adobe a few days ago and did not receive any feedback yet … not even an acknowledgment.

Please adobe, wake up and surf the Cp5 hype before it’s too late …

I submitted my new Widget to the Adobe Exchange an hour or so ago. The Exchange was one of the factor that convinced me to build my first widget. That’s a cool platform to promote your work right? So I thought too. However, I have read in the forums that it takes a lot of time to process new entries and that some entries even take months to go through the system. That’s a little bit discouraging! Especially after you have put all that hard work in. With the upcoming release of Cp5, I hope that Adobe will be more prompt to respond to new demands.

So, I will keep you posted on how it goes with the submission process.