This week release 14.0 is available in the Windows Store. It is a major release with many new features like an infinite canvas, background and foreground images, drag ‘n drop of images, moving of foreground images, better pen support, custom folders for recordings and videos. It is a major release because core parts of the app had to be redesigned and rebuild from the ground up in order to build some of the new features. For example an infinite canvas was practically impossible based on the old design. Because of this redesign, it took us some time to complete it all since our last release in September last year. But we are very happy with the result, and this opens up a lot of new possibilities for the future.

One of the features a lot of users requested is the support for an infinite canvas. When using a pen, one can use 1 finger for panning a slide. By being able to pan, it means you have an infinite canvas at your disposal. For devices that do not support a pen, one finger is used for drawing and two fingers for panning.

Release 14.0 has better support for using a pen. For example if the pen has an eraser button, like a Surface pen, one can erase lines with the pen. In both a quick and base recording, the erasing is recorded. When playing back the recording, you can see the eraser doing its work. This is unlike the undo action in a base recording. Because when undoing the drawing of a line in base recording, the line will not be part of the recording anymore. For devices that do not support a pen there is an erase mode, which can be selected in the command pallet, where you can erase by using one finger.

One other major new feature is the ability to add images as a background or a foreground image. The main distinction between them is that a background image is locked to the slide and a foreground image can be moved around. The movement of the foreground image is recorded. In case the device has pen support, touching a foreground image by one finger, you can drag the image around without moving the slide. When touching and moving a background image, the whole slide is panning. A good scenario to illustrate the difference, is to explain a checkers game, where an image of the board is added to the recording as a background image and the checkers as foreground images. For devices that do not support a pen, there is a selection mode (now also available in a quick recording) which can be selected in the command pallet. In this mode you can move a foreground image by using one finger.

In a quick recording, images have to be picked and added to an image list before the actual recording starts. In order to add an image from the list to the slide while recording, you had to tap on the image to add it to the slide. It would be placed on the slide according to the position and size of the image, when the image was added to the list. Now it is also possible to drag an image from the list and drop it on the slide at the position you would like it to appear. This is a much more intuitive and direct way of adding an image.

When doing a quick recording, there is the phase where you set up the recording before you actually are recording. For example the images have to be selected in a list before doing the voice recording. One can now also add images to the slide and drawing lines before the voice recording starts. The recording including the image list and drawing, can then be saved and used as a starting point for future quick recordings. This provides a template functionality for quick recordings in order to create recordings even more quickly.

It is now possible to set a custom folder for saving recordings and videos. For example when setting them to a OneDrive folder, they are automatically backed up to OneDrive.

Undo/redo functionality is improved because it now supports every action that is done in a recording. For example undo/redo now supports adding an image, slide panning, changing the playback speed of a base recording, or changing the pause before the drawing of a line.

As you can see, there is a ton of new features in this release. Try them out and let us know what you think of it.

Hope this helps,

Ronald