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!

We’ve received some excellent feedback and new ideas for our “clear screen” functionality.

Currently, we have one button to clear the screen, but we are going to add two more options as our users have requested:

1. A way to clear annotations only
2. A way to set the slide back to how it originally opened

As well as this, we have had users requesting for better text controls. So, we’re going to:

1. Move the textbox controls to the bottom of the screen
2. Implement textbox rotation
3. Implement textbox scroll bars

Stay tuned for the update!

As you are probably aware, OKTOPUS has several toolsets available to choose from:

Standard Tools, Maths, Literacy, Geography, Science, and Polling.

But in secondary and grammar schools, a lot of teachers just need one or two of these toolsets to be available. So, for our next update, as well as some planned bug fixes and general improvements, we’ll be adding a way to hide the unnecessary toolsets by clicking the toolset title name in Aerial View.

Recently we received a really important piece of feedback about our software, which is our choice of font. It is generally well received as it is clear and easy to read, but there are two areas where it doesn’t make sense for primary school teachers: our numbers tool and the sentence builder tool.

The number 4 and various letters are not displayed in a primary-friendly way, so we will be addressing this with a new type font very soon.

We’ve also got some of our own exciting plans for UHD/4K support in our upcoming release!

Welcome to 2016! We would like to extend our sincere thanks to our community who have taken OKTOPUS in their stride on our first year together. It’s not easy to move away from whiteboard software (especially if it’s all you’ve known) but we hope that we’ve done our part to make it as easy as it possibly can be.

Since our last release we’ve had an influx of feature requests and ideas for improving our software. And we say keep ’em coming!

There are so many great ideas, and we want to get them all in. So far we’ve had feature requests for an “open recent” function, a split-screen function (to deal with the Windows split-screen feature), shape, image, and text-box locking.

For usability we’ve had really great info from school admins about how their network locations work for AppData purposes, so we’ve changed how OKTOPUS works to deal with that. Another great feedback request is to tap anywhere once to go back to cursor mode when drawing a shape. Also worth mentioning is a request for the Word Vault to load on a per-slide basis, rather than on a per-lesson basis.

Thanks also to the users reporting bugs to us, we will do our best to address these and get them fixed for the next release.