A year of Poodll 3 …

Poodll 3 has been out on the streets for over a year now. It sneaked out early to the super heros who pre-ordered it, and was released to the general public in July of 2016. Since then the development has been constant, and the feedback from users has been outstanding.

Of course some feedback was happy and glowing, but the really useful feedback was the constructive criticism. We fed that straight back into development and Poodll 3 is now so good we could call it Poodll 4. But we won’t. We will just bark it up a little.

Support Info File

Poodll has many settings, video and audio recording is complicated, and there are many environment factors we need to consider in support. It was like playing 20 questions with users over email to piece it all together. So we took a leaf out of the Gordon Bateson (Moodle Reader and Taskchain) playbook  and implemented a support info file, that retrieves all the information we need to know to into one helpful CSV file. We can see free disk space, site url, registration code details, Poodll version numbers,  the order of filters , the filters enabled, permissions on key files etc. We now solve most support requests accompanied by a support info file, in one email.

iOS App

As much as we’d like to say “its Apple’s fault that HTML5 recording doesn’t work on iOS,” that didn’t help anyone. So we asked friend and former Moodle HQ engineer Jerome Mouneyrac to build us a Poodll iOS app. He did a great job, and we now support Poodllers on iOS better than ever.

AWS regions

Data and privacy are hot topics. Many users, from Europe in particular, had concerns about their student data leaving Europe to visit our nice servers here in Japan. So we implemented support for Amazon regions. It is now possible to keep all your Poodll cloud transactions between your server, and our Amazon servers in Japan or USA or Australia or Ireland. (Note that Red5 users, of which there are few, still have no choice but Tokyo.)

Cloud notifications

Easily the single biggest complaint we received was the annoying “Poodll is converting your audio” message. It seemed that it never went away and the reasons were myriad. So we dug deep and re-engineered the recording workflow so that the Moodle cron job was not required. Now in most cases a recording will be converted and made available in 15 seconds, regardless of how often your cron job runs.

Recorder skins

What do you mean, you don’t like “grey buttons on grey background under a grey audio player?” It turns out most people felt that way. Not only that, there were also usability issues. So we implemented Recorder skins. This is the newest of the features and is still young. But now you have the option to use better looking recorders, recorders that work more intuitively, and recorders that you can style easily with a little CSS knowledge. Look out for some inspired recorders shortly …

Countless tweaks and fixes

We have added players and widgets, including the new twice and thrice audio players. We fixed security issues. Added support for HTML5 audio recording on MS Edge. Improved support for FFMPEG. Reinstated the optional download button beside players and much more.

All of this was in response to user feedback and we want to thank you for making the first year of Poodll 3 a thrill. It has been a real tail wag.