This post will quickly go through all the new features of Scryo. It’s super exciting to share this with you! Months ago I could only imagine all these features and now here it is.

The core feature around which Scryo was designed is whiteboard calling. It allows two people to have a call between them, each using their own smartphone, tablet or computer. On-screen they have a realtime shared whiteboard, and with the live audio connection they can discuss whatever they’re doing as in a normal phone call. Check it out:

It was originally designed for university students. I provided the application to school pupils and it was quickly clear that adding a messaging feature based on the same concept would greatly enhance the usefulness!

I had already known that Scryo can be really useful if it had a messaging feature as well. But sending an image doesn’t really get a complex concept across. Besides, there is already apps that can take pictures, edit and send it. So I focused on building a whiteboard recording feature, to record whatever you draw on your canvas on-screen as well as your voice, and send that as a message:

Soon, it should also be possible to send this recording to someone via an external messenger, such as Whatsapp. (For the curious, that can be done once the support for canvas recording lands in Chrome 52 on Crosswalk, probably December 2016).

Since I had to build a messaging infrastructure into my app, it was minimal work to add the feature to send images:

And lastly, if you can send images inside Scryo, then it would make sense to be able to send it to anyone, even if they don’t have Scryo:

This caters especially to sending to someone on iOS, where the app is not yet available.

At this stage there are multiple paths forward. If I sit down and think of new features, I can think of probably 20. But using the app makes it clearer what the way forward should be. So for the next couple of weeks, I’ll be engaged with a focus group again to see how these new features can help them!

Best regards,

Tielman