A few weeks ago, dominKnow announced that new features have been added to Claro. I haven’t gotten my hands into it much yet, but from what the guys at dominKnow showed me at DevLearn and after, it seems like it’s been in very active development since I did the overview in T+D earlier this year.  Here are some of the highlights:

• Linking to other pages within the course. This is a huge step up in interactivity because it enables branching. Woot!
• Interaction templates. Think Engage/Quizmaker-type interactions and other common types. You can also create your own.
• Characters and clipart. They’ve licensed eLearning Brothers and other clipart packages to provide a variety of characters, clothes, and poses, as well as general clipart. I really like the design of the “People Browser”; they’ve put a lot of thought into the usability of it, particularly the filters that remember your choices on a course level so that it’s easy to come back and choose a different pose of the same character you’re using.
• New, extensive template library.
• Tables and shapes. Just what they sound like.
• Various usability additions such as find/replace, new keyboard shortcuts, a color picker, and the ability to change formatting on lists.
• Easy reviewing on a mobile device. I think you’ve always been able to email a link to a course for review, but now you can also pop up a QR code, point your device at the screen, and review. Just like that.
• Ability to copy and paste pages between mobile and regular versions of a course.

Other enhancements since the review include publishing to SCORM Cloud and, most impressively, a much more developed separation of the content layer from the navigation and visuals. If you aren’t familiar with it, so I’m going to suffice it to say (for now) that if you have content that resides in several courses, it’s possible — and easy — to update it once and have those changes reflected in multiple places.

All in all, this software is becoming more and more interesting to me. It still lacks variables and highly customizable actions, but for people who want easy, usable, reviewable online, and HTML5 publishing, I like how it’s shaping up.

Update: An earlier version of this post stated that Claro included an eLearning Art package instead of eLearning Brothers. Thanks, dominKnow, for notifying me of the error!