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!

OKTOPUS comes with several options for lined paper and graph paper backgrounds, as well as different effects and colours.

We’ve had teachers from nursery/kindergarten right up to university lecturers asking for more background options – specifically lined and graphing paper.

We think this is a great idea and will help to further embellish your OKTOPUS lessons, so please keep an eye out for the next version of OKTOPUS with these backgrounds implemented.

We’ll also have the usual round of improvements and bug fixes!

Primarily for our global users outside of English-speaking countries, getting handwriting recognition to work using Microsoft Windows’ built-in recogniser doesn’t always work out of the box.

So, we’re going to make this easier by improving our process. Right now we’re auto-detecting the language you’re using in Windows and trying to match that in OKTOPUS. Often, this isn’t working as expected for some users who have multiple languages installed on their system.

Going forward, we’re going to use the same handwriting engine within Windows to match the currently selected language in OKTOPUS. So if you are using OKTOPUS in French, we will attempt to use the French handwriting recognition engine. This means you will have to ensure that the handwriting pack is installed for the language you want to use OKTOPUS in. For the majority of our users with this feedback, that’s not a problem.

And if the language pack doesn’t exist, we’ll use to your system’s default handwriting recognition engine!

Expect the update soon!