New features

Simplified drawing

An important work has been done on strokes to reduce their complexity and give more fluidity to drawing. The weight of new OpenBoard documents is indeed greatly reduced

Simplified access to the objects of the library

The detailed view has been deleted for apps, interactivities, images, sounds and videos. You can simply drag and drop these elements from the library tab. To set as background an image, it is now done via the image menu after it has been dropped to the page.

Size of the background grid

You can now adjust it in the background window, with the option of a lined background.
This new parameter can be set for each page of a document. A new page is set with the background settings of the current page. A new button on the background window resets the grid size to its default value. When OpenBoard starts, the size is initialized to represent approximately 1cm on the screen. Indeed, the size of the grid is preserved while importing a document on another computer. Geometry tools have been adjusted to fit this initialization.

Background grid tab on preferences

You can now choose the color of the grid and the its opacity on dark and light backgrounds. The grid opacity is ignored if the zoom is lower than ~0.7.

Thumbnails tab drag and drop

Thumbnails can be reordered using the pen/mouse, by drag and drop. The "move up page" and "move down page" icons have been retired. The "remove page" and "duplicate page" icons' size was increased by a factor of 2.

Podcast module on Linux (screen recording)

The screen recording is finally available on Linux. ffmpeg is used for video encoding, with the MP4 format (h264/AAC).

Pen tool circle preview

Above a certain size (set in preferences), a circle preview appears.

Software update option

A new parameter in the configuration file allows to hide the "check for software update" option in the OpenBoard menu.

Planète-Sankore widgets

Because planete-sankore.org is down, the research applications (image, audio, video and flash medias) had to be deleted.

Clock Widget

The Clock widget used in Open-Sankore has been added to the library.

Bug fixes

• The state of the zoom was persisted on each page, but not the state of the position of the view. Now both are.
• The "visible on extended screen" property was not correctly persisted.
• Several corrections have been added to improve their behavior on object groups.
• Text box : resizing, using the left handle, was causing unexpected text box moving
• Text box : you could lose the cursor by dragging an image or a shape on a text box.
• Text box : OpenBoard could crash, while trying to select a text box by its border with the text tool selected.
• OpenBoard could crash when erasing part of a stroke, drawn with the compass, and the center cross, simultaneously.
• You could lose data if you had only one document on the main directory.

Known Issues

Podcast module on Linux

• the module's performance depends on its configuration, so please don't use too high resolutions on slow devices,
• last images of a record can not be added to the video,
• recording is slow on desktop mode.

Podcast module on Mac

• audio sometimes loops,
• audio and video can be unsynchronized if the user stops his annotations.

Internal web navigator

Many errors, mainly on secured sites (https). The internal web navigator may be removed on a future release of OpenBoard.

Data loss

Most issues concerning data loss have been resolved. However, in some cases (network context, slow computers), some features related to the data saving may not behave as expected. For example, it is possible for the duplication of a page to be done before the save of the duplicated page by the thread which has to perform this save. If so, you have to delete the new page and retry the duplication on the original page.

This issue brings several small fixes, related mainly to drawing.

Changelog

• Fixed several issues relating to copy-pasting and cut-and-pasting elements from one page or document to another
• Fixed an issue on Windows where OpenBoard could crash upon saving the document when a video was on the board
• Fixed an issue where pen strokes that had been erased with the eraser would reappear after saving and loading.
• Fixed an issue where duplicating a pen stroke that had been moved could cause the new stroke to be placed in the wrong position
• Fixed an issue where strokes could be badly placed after using the "undo" and "redo" functions
• Fixed an issue where compass strokes were not saved (when making several strokes, only the first one was saved)
• Fixed an issue where pages could be truncated when exporting to PDF
• Fixed an issue where locked items could be moved when part of a multiple selection
• (Document mode) Fixed document selection after deleting a trashed document
• Tweaked the background grid color for the dark background
• The mask tool can now be resized non-proportionately
• Re-implemented automatic update checking, which will appear to users when the next version is released

Changelog

• Fixed an issue where text could be displayed at different sizes on different platforms, even with the same font and font size. From now on, a newly created or modified document should display the same on all platforms (provided one uses version 1.3.5)
• Fixed an issue in document mode where deleting a document by drag-n-drop could make OpenBoard crash
• Fixed a bug where media elements couldn't be selected by rubber band
• Document mode: multiple documents can now be moved together, by drag-n-drop
• Added a setting in the configuration files for the background grid's colour*
• Added Basque translation (credit: Inigo Gebara)
• Updated German translation (credit: EmPeWe)
• Fixed the colour of the highlighter cursor in desktop mode
• Fixed an issue where in desktop mode, the display could be cloned even if multi-display mode was deactivated
• Fixed an issue in document mode where OpenBoard could crash when deleting pages from a document
• Fixed an issue where groups of objects or pen strokes that had been locked would be unlocked when saving then loading the document
• Fixed an issue where groups of objects lost their transforms (movement, rotation, scaling) when saving then loading the document
• Specified a minimum size for the protractor, so that it can no longer be resized to an unusable size
• Shrunk the compass slightly
• Shrunk the set-square
• Fixed an issue where the position of groups of pen strokes could be lost upon saving and loading the document
• Fixed an issue where locked objects could be moved by dragging them directly (rather than by their selection frame)
• Fixed an issue where the icons on a text box's frame could overflow from the frame, on low-resolution displays on Windows or Linux
• Fixed an issue where OpenBoard would crash upon exiting with an empty, but modified document
• Fixed an issue where the Open-Sankoré importer would not launch, on Windows

(*) This allows the user to change the colour or opacity of the background grid, for example if it isn't sufficiently visible on a low-contrast display or projector.
The parameters can be found in the Board category and are named CrossColorDarkBackground and CrossColorLightBackground for the colour of the background grid on dark and light backgrounds, respectively.
The possible values for these parameters are strings respecting any of the following formats:

• #RGB
• #RRGGBB
• #AARRGGBB
• #RRRGGGBBB
• #RRRRGGGGBBBB
• SVG colour keywords, as defined by W3C

Where A = alpha (transparency); R = red; G = green; B = blue, in hexadecimal values.

The default values are:

CrossColorDarkBackground=#C82C2C2C
CrossColorLightBackground=#A5E1FF

This release fixes various bugs, some which appeared in v1.3.3, and some of which have been around for a while.

Changes

• OS X: fixed desktop drop shadow bug: when switching from desktop mode to board mode and back, shadows were drawn behind annotations; these persisted even if the annotation was erased
• Windows: Updated bundled Visual C++ runtime library; fixed installer so that the library installation would be silent (no more dialog box appearing)
• Linux: fixed detection of "cloned" multi-monitor setups to avoid multi-screen mode being activated in this configuration. [Note: some problems remain with multi-monitor setups on some Linux versions; see Known Issues]
• Text items: text can no longer be selected or edited if the text item is marked as non-editable through its menu
• Text items: on page load, text items no longer take keyboard focus
• Library pane: fixed moving of items (upon moving an item to a folder, the item would not immediately disappear from its current location)
• Library pane: fixed nested folder issue in breadcrumbs trail (two folders that were at the same path and whose names started with the same characters were considered by the breadcrumbs trail to be nested)
• Document view: fixed folder names not being saved after renaming them
• Fixed audio item saving (v1.3.3 bug): documents containing an audio item were saved incorrectly, making the audio unplayable upon page load
• Desktop mode: eraser and marker preview circles now disappear when the cursor hovers over the left or right-hand toolbars, as in board mode

Known issues

On Ubuntu 14.04, some desktop environments cause problems in extended desktop mode. Specifically, on MATE, multi-screen mode is currently broken, with both OpenBoard windows (control and display views) appearing on the same display. On KDE, swapping the control and display views via the preferences menu can cause both windows to appear on the same display, but this can be solved by turning multi-screen mode off and on again, or by restarting OpenBoard.

Bug fixes related mostly to import and export of documents.

Importing .UBZ's created on another computer or another version of OpenBoard and which contained a PDF item in the background sometimes led to incorrect scaling of the PDF.
Moreover, exporting a document containing a PDF item to PDF often resulted in the PDF item being badly positioned or scaled. All of this should now be fixed, making it much easier to work with documents across different computers.

28.8.16 Version Windows 1.3.3 is a new release.

This release brings a few bug fixes, mainly related to desktop interaction and multi-screen mode on Linux.

Changes since 1.3.0:

• Fixed Google Maps widget
• Fixed some issues with multi-screen setups when recording podcasts or taking screenshots
• Improved quality of screenshots slightly
• Fixed an issue with partial screenshots in desktop mode on some Linux desktop environments
• Fixed positioning of text boxes after duplication

Version 1.3.0, the first major update since 1.02.10.

The Ubuntu 14.04 package includes required Qt libraries and plugins; the 16.04 package does not, as the right Qt versions are already available in the official Ubuntu repositories.

More details and changelog here

Second (and normally last) release candidate for version 1.3.0