Tuple's August Release & Other News

Quick summary

• We’re hiring a WebRTC expert to bring mobbing support to Tuple. Please apply or share the job posting with someone great.
• We added some new features: an (optional) persistent indicator showing which display you’re sharing, we now exclude the webcam window from your screen share, and made a bunch of small improvements to make Tuple more Mac-y.
• SSO users: you no longer have to sign in after every app restart. Woohoo!
• We’re dropping High Sierra support in November, when Apple is expected to stop issuing security updates for it.
• We have some solid improvements in the pipeline: fewer crashes, better automatic call reconnection, better support for 3-person calls, and some onboarding improvements.
• If you could use someone to pair with, you can get $40 off your first Codementor session by signing up through this link.

A short hello from Ben (and a favor request)

News items

We’re hiring a WebRTC expert (and would love your help)

We want to hire an experienced WebRTC programmer to help bring mobbing (meaning pairing sessions with more than 3 participants) to Tuple.

If this feature is on your wish-list, you can help out quite directly by referring awesome candidates to our job posting.

We’re moving to a monthly release cadence

A number of you have requested that we update the app a bit less frequently. We’re going to test out doing monthly releases for a while to see how it feels.

So far, so good.

We’re dropping High Sierra support on November 1st

November 1st is when Apple is expected to stop offering security updates for High Sierra.

We think it’s important to only run Tuple on secure systems, so we’ll disable the ability to run Tuple on High Sierra near that date.

This change affects less than 2% of you, but we wanted to give you plenty of notice anyway.

We’ve partnered with Codementor so you can pair with experts

Need someone to pair with? Want to get a quick tech question answered by an expert? Codementor is a great way to bring in short-term development help.

As a Tuple customer, following this link will give you $40 in free credits to use on mentoring sessions or freelance jobs. (Any unused credits will expire in 30 days.)

New stuff in Tuple

We pushed v0.78 today. Here’s what’s new.

More Macification

Thanks to our Mac expert Mikey, Tuple has been getting more and more Mac-y. Here are a few small examples:

• More of Tuple’s sub-windows (like preferences or other models) now respond to standard macOS shortcuts like Command+w and Command+`.
• Tuple now shows up in the Command+Tab results in a more predictable way.
• You can now select a call rating by double-clicking the rating emoji or by pressing Command+[a number between 1 and 5] (and then Command+Return to submit).
• Previously, if you were trying to type on a remote machine but had your mouse outside the Tuple window, we wouldn’t send your keystrokes. That wasn’t very Mac-like (it was more X11-y, really), so we changed it. Now, your keystrokes will be sent whenever the Tuple window has focus (provided you haven’t disabled this in the guest toolbar).

New: display sharing indicator

Lots of folks have told us that they love how unobtrusive the Tuple UI was, but said maybe we’d gone just a touch too far and should have a persistent element that makes it super clear when you’re sharing your screen.

We agreed, and added what we hope is a clear, but still-unobtrusive border:

This feature is on by default, but you can disable it in preferences if you prefer Tuple to run in stealth mode.

New: webcam sharing exclusion

If you’re sharing your screen, and someone shares their webcam with you, it creates a weird situation where they’re forced to watch a slightly-delayed version of their own webcam feed on your screen.

That’s distracting, but it’s also bad for CPU and bandwidth usage, since Tuple needs to capture/encode/transmit a live video feed as part of your screen share. Higher resource usage and (likely) more latency. Ew.

To get rid of this unfortunate situation, we now magically exclude the webcam window from your screen share.

In this first screenshot, I’m sharing my screen with Joel, and he’s turned on his webcam. This is what I see on my actual desktop:

And here’s what Joel sees:

Poof! No webcam.

One really cool detail: since your pair might click on the webcam window and not know they’re doing it, we automatically send their clicks through the window so they can interact with elements underneath it as normal. Kind of slick, right?

Bug fixes

• You might not know this, but there’s a Tuple preference to persist all drawings on the screen until their creator has right-clicked. This used to only work for guests, but now it works for hosts as well. Paint away, friends.
• SSO folks: you should no longer have to sign in after every app restart. Sorry you had to live with this for so long.
• When you’re using the Tag Team mouse mode, there is just one mouse cursor, and each person takes turns using it. To get control when you don’t have it, you click one time. For guests, we’ve always swallowed this first click so you don’t accidentally click something when you’re just trying to get control. Now, we do this on the host side too.
• If you’ve enabled the preference to automatically start a webcam feed when calls begin, this will be respected for audio-only calls too.

Upcoming improvements

Here’s a sneak-peek at what we’re shipping soonish:

• Fixes for our most common crashes.
• Far fewer dropped calls.
• A fix for the issue where two people calling each other at the same time can lead to unpredictable behavior.
• A better first-run experience for the app.
• Better support for 3-person calls (observer mode). Currently, observers can’t draw on the screen, and the presence of an observer adds surprising limitations on the other call participants. We’re going to do a pass on this feature to flesh it out and make it more useful.

Until next month!