Thanks again to everyone who has been in touch with us with their latest feedback and requests.

With 4K / UHD flatpanels now being sold over 1080p / FHD flatpanels, we get a lot of users asking us about 4K support. We actually added in native 4K support last year, so when you run OKTOPUS on a 4K flatpanel, it means:

• OKTOPUS runs in native 4K out-of-the-box – no additional config required
• 4K content is fully supported – ie images and video
• The OKTOPUS user interface is perfectly sized – every icon and button looks as it should
• The OKTOPUS canvas (drawing area) is native 4K – you can use every pixel available
• There is no pixelation – everything is sharp

However, there is one sticking point for our 4K users. The current hardware requirements to run OKTOPUS in 4K – which a lot of users simply don’t have – means that a lot of users experience a slow pen. We are committed to fixing this and giving the best 4K performance we can, even with integrated graphics cards such as the entry-level Intel HD520.

In fact, our recent development tests have shown that on a standard OPS module (i5 processor, 8GB RAM, Intel HD520 and a traditional hard drive), OKTOPUS deals with the pen in 4K effortlessly!

We can’t wait to get this new version out the door – keep your eyes peeled!

Our Smart Notebook import functionality has been well received and we have been hearing about some missing functionality that people would love to see.

These include: better shape import support, background colours and images, ordered and unordered lists, adding .notebook files to the “open recent” area, and reading in the filename as the OKTOPUS project name. We’ve got all of these on our to-do list for the next update, so please keep an eye out for that.

We’ve also received valuable feedback from a chemistry teacher who let us know that the element “Gallium” should be listed as a solid at STP. Thanks for the info, we’ll get that one updated!

In addition, we’re planning to add a touch-friendly Presentation Setup window for our polling and collaboration, and we’ve got loads of other improvements and bug fixes on the way.

We have some exciting new changes to OKTOPUS which we will be able to share more of once released, but we also have some new feature requests from our community which we’d like to talk about here.

Our users have asked for new shapes, so we will added a plethora of new shapes to choose from. Right now you can draw a rectangle/square, a circle, a triangle, or a freehand shape. But we’ll be adding in stars, shapes, and a bunch of random shapes too! All of these shapes can be edited to change their line colour, fill colour, and opacity.

For our maths teachers among you, we have added in the ability to set the number of significant figures when creating OKTOPUS sums. This will be set through the Preferences screen under the Settings cog. By default, it will be set to 3.

We’ll be getting both of these in for the next update, so keep an eye out!

Also coming for the next update is a brand new audio playback tool design for a better audio experience within OKTOPUS.

As soon as we had implemented IWB import support, we continued to get requests for direct import of Smart Notebook files from our user community.

We are happy to say that we are now working on adding in this functionality to our software! We understand that a lot of schools are moving away from Smart Notebook for various reasons, and are now using OKTOPUS as a direct replacement, so we want to ensure that the transition goes as smoothly as possible.

Our next release will import Smart Notebook files to the same level as our IWB import support, which includes annotations, shapes, lines, images, and text.

Stay tuned for an update!