New Features: HD, responsive video, fullscreen review and redesigned comments

We’ve focused on iterating and improving the parts of Wipster we think matter the most over the last month: playing video and commenting on video. This is the core functionality of Wipster and we know small improvements here will make a big difference to our users. Here’s some of the highlights - enjoy.

Fullscreen and responsive video

Without a doubt, watching a smooth-as-butter 1080p encode in full screen mode is the best way to give feedback on video using Wipster. We’ve always been about keeping things simple, but this takes it to another level entirely. Giving feedback in fullscreen mode means there is absolutely nothing between the viewer and what they want to say about the video they're watching.

We were careful when we designed full screen that no functionality would have to be abandoned to make it work. Everything, including reading and writing comments, had to work as usual. No exceptions. From a technical perspective this was no small feat, but we're totally excited by the result.

We’ve also made our player hugely more adaptive to whatever screen you happen to be using. We don’t think it makes any sense to serve huge video to tiny screens, so we’ve re-engineered our playback system to automatically detect the screen size. The result - Wipster will deliver both the video quality and size that makes sense.

HD

Wipster is a precision collaboration tool, so it makes sense to provide a canvas that’s in as high definition as possible. Across all our premium accounts we’ve improved the way we encode video to provide an optimised set of encodes that work as well for a Chromebook as a 5k iMac user. Although our system is smart enough to detect and display the right quality for each user’s screen we’ve been careful to make sure you have the power to set it yourself. Sometimes you just want HD. We understand.

Redesigned comments

Comments are the charge in Wipster's wires. They're the connective tissue that brings together all the aspects of the ecosystem. We’ve added a ton of functionality and usability improvements to make the system more intuitive and even more useful.

Sometimes a comment is so simple it can be actioned there and then. We want that to be as easy possible, so we added the ability to complete an item on the todo list right on the relevant comment.

We’ve also enabled ‘liking’ across the comment system.  It’d be fair to say that this concept needs little introduction. We thought it made sense to implement a system that everyone understands already. If you want to throw your weight behind another person’s opinion this is the easiest way to do it.

On top of these headliners there are a whole raft of improvements across the video player experience. We’re happy to send a free Mars bar to anyone who can spot all of them, but a lot of them are small iterations aimed at making things better ‘between the lines’.

We’ve got a whole host more new features to roll out in the coming months, but in the meantime, go forth.

New in this release

• Full screen playback and commenting
• HD video for premium account holders (720p and 1080p)
• Responsive video playback
• Video playback stability improvements
• ‘Approved’ stamp for thumbnails
• Push browser notifications for commenting
• Improved onboarding for account holders
• Improved onboarding for first time commenters
• Unified help center
• Support tickets can now be raised in app
• Support center articles are now accessible inside the app
• Comments react to their todo status
• Comments can be edited
• Comments can be liked
• Comments are minimised during playback
• Todos can be completed from the comment itself
• Many many other bugs fixes and minor improvements.

We love hearing from Wipster users, so let us know which features are bringing you joy in a comment below.
- The Wipster Team