appear.in

It is no secret that appear.in are blessed with wonderful and dedicated fans.

On February 4th Ane and Nils from our team went to a Folk High School called Bjerkely. The school offers a comic class, where the students get to develop their personal drawing style by solving different tasks.

Four students had made comics about appear.in, which showcased both what people love about our service as well as their individual drawing styles.

We love the results:

Credits: Torkil Malvik Bidtnes

It’s all in the details in this one. Just look at how the angles of the main character’s head are synchronised perfectly.

Credits: Sigrid Moe

Sigrid actually used some of the emojis that can be found inside appear.in to star in this comic strip. A really clever way to show how the service works!

Credits: Margrethe Dahl

Margrethe expresses very clearly how frustrating it can be when apps don’t work the way they should. We are delighted that people think it is easy to use appear.in. 

Credits: Chris Sjøbakk

This one is by far the longest one, and is also highlighting the frustration that can occur when errors dominate. We think it is beautifully drawn!

A couple of weeks ago, we were approached by David, one of the founders of the online whiteboard service Limnu. He wanted to see if there was a way to integrate appear.in with their service, so that people could see and talk to each other while drawing on the board. 

We thought this was a GREAT idea, so after a quick video meeting, they proceeded with using our API to embed appear.in rooms into their whiteboards. 

So, from today, there’s a super-easy way to launch a video chat while you’re collaborating and whiteboarding in Limnu!

Here’s how to start a video or audio chat while you draw on your Limnu board:

Click the “plus” icon in the menu

Choose “Chat”

In the chat window that opens, click on the “Video Chat” icon

When you’re ready to go on camera, click “Enter video room”

Ho ho ho!

In the spirit of the holiday season, we have a present for you!

To unwrap your present, head to your favorite room with your friends and be sure you’re logged in. Click on the emoji button on your video, and you’ll see a Christmas tree at the bottom of the popup window.  

Whether crowning yourself for St Lucia’s day or wearing Santa’s beard, you’re sure to spread holiday cheer!

As some of you might remember, we released a beta feature a while back; video stickers. Now we have built it into our product, and even made a button for it! It is placed on the right end of the panel that appears when hovering over your own video stream:

When you press the emoji button, a menu will emerge, with a selection of emojis. Click on the one you want to fire:

Emojis offers a great opportunity for giving non-verbal feedback on things being said by others, without interrupting anything. Also, it is quite funny.

We are happy to present a new - and long requested - feature; the ability to make people members of a room!

Are you using a specific room together with the same group of people every day? Want certain people to be able to enter your locked room without having to knock first?

Well, then this is the feature for you!

So how does this work? It’s simple; Room owners can make everyone that are in a room that he/she owns a member. Just hover over the video, and click the icon on the right hand side:

How to add members to a room

Voilà!

As a room member, you are given a set of powers:

- You can access a locked room without having to knock first

- You can lock and unlock the room you are a member of

- You can let knockers into the room

- You can kick and block others, unless they’re the owner or a member of the room

- You can also unblock people you yourself have blocked

Sounds good? Great!

It’s worth noticing that room owners are still the most powerful ones, with the ability to revoke memberships, just in case some members should abuse their powers and rise up against them. Although, members will get a cool badge to show of their powers.

If you are not famiiar with Trello, it is one of the best ways to organize work in a team. You can set up a board with several lists, such as “To Do”, “In Progress” and “Done” to track what everyone in the team is working on. This is especially important when someone in the team is working remotely and cannot take part in the everyday office chatter. 

To make it even easier to work remotely, we have joined forces with Trello to integrate appear.in as a “Power up” app in their revamped Business Class subscription that they launched today. This will enable everyone in the team to click the appear.in button in the top menu of the board, and they will appear together in an appear.in room (duh)! 

How to use appear.in with Trello Business Class:

Click Show menu > Power Ups

Enable appear.in 

You’ll now see an appear.in button in the top menu

When it’s time for you team meeting, tell everyone to click the appear.in button 

A separate tab will open with the appear.in room, drag the tab out in to a separate window and resize it so you can see both the board and the people on video!

How to use appear.in with Trello

Oh, and btw, make sure to check out our secret (?) video sticker codes. They are really handy when you have a team meeting and those on video want to give a thumbs up or thinks something is FAIL ;) 

This is just a crude version using our API, and we would love to hear your feedback on how we can make improvements! 

As the biggest developer conference in Norway, Javazone every year gathers around 2500 developers from Norway and abroad. Two of our team members were lucky to be admitted as speakers, and we are happy to post their talks here. 

Juggling chainsaws while on fire: Introduction to Product Management

Lisa Long is the product development manager at appear.in. Prior to appear.in she worked at Skype, where she rolled out the product process that allocated $150 million worth of resources a quarter (2000 engineers, 170 product managers.) Before Skype, she cofounded Six to Start, makers of Zombies, Run!, where she produced games for the likes of Channel 4 and the BBC. In her spare time, Lisa served as a mentor focused on product for the likes of Seedcamp (London), StartupWiseGuys (Tallinn), Microsoft Accelerator (London), and the Cartier Women's Initiative(global). She also served as a thesis mentor for the UCL Masters in Technical Entrepreneurship.

“Think that you can make everyone happy, all of the time? Looking for a challenge that covers everything from design to business to code? Just wondering what the heck it is that a product manager is supposed to do for the team? Come learn what this dark art covers and what the different aspects are of being a success in this position. Using the Martin Eriksson definition of a product manager, we'll dive into each of the competency areas - tech, business, and design - that a product manager needs to master. By reviewing a combination of industry and personal stories, we'll evaluate these different areas for the types of hard skills (e.g. juggling chainsaw requirements, negotiating wild goose chases, expectation lion taming...) needed for flourishing in this role. Finally, we'll take a look at how these are used in a day to day environment in trying to please the varying stakeholders that a product manager encounters. Covering the range from expectation management of the business to reading through API docs to understand the limitations of third party services being pitched to developers, this section takes a look at who wants what on a regular basis. Come for the magic of product management, stay for the reality tv show of getting things built!”

Taming the WebRTC beast on Android

Dag-Inge Aas is software Engineer at appear.in, basically getting paid to have fun. Currently working a mix between talking a lot, and making appear.in on Android great.

To make it easier to communicate your opinion or emotions during a meeting or standup (when you may be muted) we have added video stickers!

This is still a beta feature, so they can only be triggered on PC (not mobile) by entering keyboard codes. Try typing these in a room (make sure the cursor is not in the chat):

like

yes

ok

unicorn  

greetings  

lol  

gift  

rockout  

klaxon  

puppy  

battery  

plus1  

wall  

nuke

party

beans

horns

selfie

seal

unad

arrr

nono

cluck

pizza

suitup

pork

gotcha

soon

cheers

heart

gaaad

love

facep

deal

awes

yolo

doge

fail

coolstory

tnt

xoxo

poop

itsatrap

cake

rosebud

arne

roads

Bonus! Enter the Konami code (Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A Enter) to trigger a random sticker ;)

It's now even easier to work together when someone in your team is working remotely - everyone in your team can now follow a room in appear.in and get notified whenever someone enters the room or writes a chat message.

Set up a room for your team now:

Enter the room you want to use (on mobile or PC), make sure you are logged in as the owner of the room. 

Click "Settings" > "Followers" and turn on "Allow Following"

Ask your team mates to enter the room and follow it:

On PC: click the "Follow room" button, and follow the instructions.

On mobile: Create a new user, then go into the room and click the settings icon in the top right corner, then "Follow room".

To receive notifications, install the mobile apps or enable desktop notifications.

To start a conversation, simply go into the room and everyone will be notified with previews of the chat messages!  

Never miss a thing

We are happy to announce that you can now follow rooms!  This allows you to receive notifications of who goes into a room and what they write in chat, even when you’re not there! You can receive notifications on your mobile app, or on desktop.

Here’s the gist of how it works:

Once a room owner has turned on following, anyone can follow that room.

Following is turned on by default in new rooms, and can be disabled from room settings.

Owners are notified every time there’s a new follower, and can control the access through the Followers tab under Room Settings.  

Following your favorite rooms means you know where your friends are - you’ll be notified every time someone enters the room and get the content of all the chat messages in the room.  You can stay up to date on what’s happening and know where to go to find people to chat with!

Likewise, entering a room with following turned on means followers are notified of where you are, and can come join you in the room.  As a follower of the room, you can see the rest of the followers along the bottom of the room and you’ll receive any chat messages sent.

We know that sometimes notifications can get a bit noisy, so we also have the ability to mute notifications per room.  We want to make sure you get your beauty sleep!

Go on, get started! Enable following in your existing rooms or create new rooms and invite your friends.

As many of you may know, one of the core technologies making appear.in possible is called WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communications). WebRTC is a new web standard, built on open-source technology, that is enabling developers to create low-latency audio and video applications, directly in the browser, without having to use plugins. WebRTC was mainly developed at Google, who open sourced the project in 2011, and has been the biggest contributor to the project since.

appear.in was one of the very first commercial WebRTC applications to launch. Originally developed by three students in only two weeks, it showed the disruptive potential of WebRTC. Since then, appear.in has grown from being a tech prototype into a full-fledged product, which is used every day in almost all countries of the world (even North Korea!). During the last two years, our team have had a close relationship with Google, contributing end-user feedback and reporting bugs directly to the core team developing WebRTC support in Chrome.

Over the past few months, we have been busy creating our new Android app, which we launched on May 26th. During development, we were approached by Google, asking us to create tutorials for getting started with WebRTC on Android and iOS. In addition, we would be starring in our very own Google Developer video, explaining the basics of using WebRTC cross-platform, an area very few teams have yet to explore. Together with Google, we made a tutorial based on the challenges we have faced, to make it easy for other developers to get started with using WebRTC:

The way we see it, WebRTC is at the very forefront of a revolution on the web. It enables developers to easily create peer-to-peer apps, that will interoperate across all platforms and devices. For the very first time, you are able to share data in the browser directly to another device, all end-to-end encrypted without going via third-party servers. And while the main focus of WebRTC has been audio and video, we have seen applications in health services, low-latency file transfer, and even gaming. Hopefully, with our guides, developers will now be able to more easily built native apps using WebRTC both on iOS and Android.

We know that a lot of appear.in users are also gamers, so we invited the captain of Norway’s leading team in Counter-Strike to join a mini-talkshow together with artist Sondre Justad at our ambassador summer party. After the talkshow, we got to have a chat with Anders about his experience with building up a team and what advice he has for other ambitious gamers (interview is in Norwegian):

Anders and Sondre Justad discussing the challenges of building your own career by pursuing your passion: 

To thank all of our supertesters who have helped us develop appear.in into an even more awesome video chat service this spring, we threw an exclusive party at co-working space Mesh in Oslo. 

The ambassadors got to see brand new functionality that’s still under development, that have been designed based on their feedback. The up-and-coming singer Sondre Justad gave a private concert performing his new single "Tilbake" live for the first time! 

How do I become an ambassador? 

We are happy to announce that you can now use the text chat in appear.in on all platforms; desktop & mobile web, iOS & now also Android! 

Allowing easy video conversations across platforms is core to our product, and we are happy to improve the mobile experience of appear.in. 

When we launched appear.in almost two years ago, the first version was very basic and only had video and audio. One thing that became immediately clear to us after getting feedback from lots of users, was that we needed to add text chat. So we did.

Since then, text chat has been something that are used in a lot of conversations and a couple of weeks ago we released a big upgrade to the chat in the web version. The chat no longer covers the videos, but appears on the right-hand side. It’s now easier to read the chat history, and see who’s sending messages. The chat now also shows emoijs, yey! 👏😎🎉👊

But appear.in now also exists on other platforms; a mobile web version, iOS app and from today, also an Android app.

iOS app improved

There is a new version of the iOS app available, with several improvements: 

preview of text chat messages

watch the live videos while reading the chat history or typing a message

lock rooms from the app

better layout, videos will resize based on number of participants

the app is much more stable

lower battery usage

New mobile web version

On Android devices, appear.in works directly in the browsers Chrome, Firefox and Opera. We have now upgraded the mobile web version to make it much faster to load, with better navigation, support for locking rooms and most importantly text chat!

This means you can now invite anyone to a chat by sending the room link to them, and once they click it on their Android device they will enter the chat directly, without having to install anything.

Click the plus icon to copy the link and invite someone:

We are happy to announce that appear.in is now available on yet another platform: as of today you’ll find our brand new Android app in Google Play.

The app lets you enter an existing appear.in room, or generate a new random room, just by clicking the “Start now” button. 

Chat while seeing your friends on video

The new Android app also has text chat, so you can send and receive chat messages while seeing everyone on video. The chat has a preview function, where the messages will just appear on top of the videos so you can quickly read them. If you want to reply or read the chat history, you can simply tap the chat button to open the chat editor. You’ll continue to see the live videos while reading the chat! 

Invite people easily

To invite people to the room you’re in, click the Plus icon and choose which app you want to send the room link in (Facebook messenger, SMS, email etc.).

We have also made improvements to our mobile web version, so that when you invite people and they click the link, they will come right into the conversation if they have Chrome, Firefox or Opera on their Android phone or tablet. If they have an iPhone or iPad, they will be prompted to install the app first, as iOS doesn’t support conversations directly in the browser. 

You can of course turn off your microphone or camera at any time during a conversation. To have a private conversation, just lock the room by clicking the lock button. If anyone tries to enter when the room is locked, you will see them knock and can choose to accept or reject them. 

More to come!

We wanted to release the Android app as soon as possible, so we had to leave some things out of the first version. But we are already hard at work with the next version, which will contain more functionality, like the ability to log in with your profile to enable app notifications from the app. In the meantime, you can enable SMS notifications in the desktop web version, by creating a profile or logging in.

If you claimed a room a while ago, but haven’t created a profile yet, make sure to read this. 

There might also be bugs in the app, and we would greatly appreciate if you report them to [email protected] if you discover any, so we can fix them as soon as possible.

Let us know how you like the app and what you want us to improve in future versions! Send us an email or get in touch on Twitter.

Great news: We have revolutionized our chat with lots of great improvements. The changes are as always based on feedback from the people we love the most in the world: YOU, our users! 

First of all, instead of overlaying the videos when open, the chat will now smoothly place itself on the right side of the screen. This change ensures that you don’t have to miss out on your friend’s expression when you sent a scandalous emoji*. We also think this makes the balance between video and chat more natural, and the overall impression of the room tidier.

(*To send emoijs on Mac, simply press CTRL+CMD+Space to open the emoji keyboard. Here are instructions for Windows) 

Chat bubbles with different colors makes it easier to separate your own sent messages from the ones you have received, in addition to it being placed at separate sides of the chat. Like before, the chat messages will be complimented with a real time snapshot of the sender. If you have your video turned off, a profile picture will replace this, if you’re a signed in user.

If you don’t have your chat window open, you will get a real time preview of your received messages, as shown below. If your appear.in conversation is situated in another tab than you’re currently using, the number of unread chat messages will be displayed in the tab.

The shortcut for opening the chat window is simply “Shift+C”, and to close it just press “ESC”.

Many of our users have asked us about the possibilities for recording appear.in conversations. Unfortunately, the technology is not yet mature enough to allow us to offer this as a feature, but we saw that the guys behind the vidcast Loading Savestate had done a great production job, and asked them to write up their experiences.  

Here is a guest blog post by Chris Edwards from Savestate, which hopefully can serve as inspiration and provide useful tips for how to make your own podcast/vidcast:

Hi there! My name is Chris Edwards and I am the founder of Savestate. You might be wondering what Savestate is, or more importantly why I’m here writing a blog article for the fantastic guys at appear.in? To put it simply, myself and another Chris created Savestate as a means to promote games released by Indie Developers. We write news articles, review/preview articles, as well as produce a myriad of video content to help promote these developers and their games. We invite developers, media personalities and everyone else to chat with us in the hopes of being able to spread the word about games that may not get much attention to the people who matter the most, the gamers!

So what does ANY of this have to do with appear.in you ask? Well as part of the above we also do a weekly Podcast/Vidcast that we release every Friday in which we discuss the previous weeks topics on gaming and games culture and give shout outs to upcoming titles. Where appear.in comes into play here is that we utilise this awesome video communication system to not only get together and chat, but also to record and release our Vidcasts online. For this reason we’ve been informed that there may be other people out there who want to record Vidcasts via appear.in as well, so the point of this post is to try and help you out with getting yourself ready to use appear.in for your very own content.

So we’ll start with the nuts and bolts of how we produce and record our Vidcasts. The very first thing we did was obviously set up and claim a room to prevent unauthorised access by those we don’t want to making an appearance on our cast! Once we had the room set up we obviously then get our participants to access the room with their camera and microphone active, we’ve had guests from other parts of Australia and even overseas and the video quality of appear.in has been flawless every time, which is perfect for what we do. Each week myself and the other Chris are generally present and we usually invite one or two others to join us (no more than 4 for our particular setup) for our 30~ minute weekly cast.

So does gear matter? Yes and no. Griff and myself both use a RODE NT-USB Microphone that we specifically purchased for Podcasting and have found the sound quality to be top notch. We also both use the Logitech C920 1080p Webcam for our video feed which is also fairly flawless. That being said, our guests don’t always have professional equipment, that’s not an issue that we’ve found with appear.in. Even lower quality microphones and cameras still come through clearly and whilst some video feeds may be a little grainy, that is 100% the quality of the camera.

So that’s the gear that we use, but how do we ‘actually’ record it? Well, as Griff and I both do a lot of recording of game footage, we both own an AverMedia Live Gamer HD PCIe Capture Card. Because of this we are not only able to capture game footage, but we can also record our screens, so we simply get our appear.in session ready with everyone hit F11 to make the window Fullscreen and then start recording our screen. Our particular setup records both the Video Footage as well as all audio, with the recorder’s Audio as a separate .mp3 file. There are MANY ways to record Audio/Video using Appear.in however this is the way we’ve set ours up. So after the recording is finished and we’ve got our raw output files there we of course need to edit the footage, add our Intro and Outro and apply an overlay to really make it our own. Both Griff and I have a subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud giving us full access to the Creative Cloud suite that we use for this purpose. We created a special Intro and Outro to add to our footage in Adobe After Effects and use Adobe Photoshop to create our transparent overlays. We put this all together in Adobe Premiere Pro to make sure the audio and video sync up, that everything looks great and render it out to upload!

It can take a while to get the hang of using the above software, however there are hundreds of video tutorials out and about that can easily help with learning how to do specific things. I, personally, had never used Adobe After Effects before and with the help of some tutorials came up with our Intro and Outro sequence in about 3 days. I learnt how to do keyframing within Premiere Pro in order to make sure everything was synchronised correctly and that we have a nice end result to upload to YouTube. This is merely the basics of what we do, I could write multiple pages on every step of the process from start to finish, but perhaps I’ll leave that for another time.

There have, of course, been challenges with setting this up. We needed to find a layout that was suitable for us and of course the viewer. Previously we used Google Hangouts, but we found that the video quality just wasn’t up to scratch, and whilst the facility for full screen video was handy, the poor quality just made it look out of place. So, in storms appear.in and (so far) it has managed to fit our needs perfectly. Whilst there is no facility for automatic fullscreen video switching (depending on who is speaking) it did give us the opportunity to play with other layouts that look and feel right. If you’d like to check out our content we put up our weekly Podcast/Vidcast recorded here on appear.in over at Loading Savestate, or up on our YouTube channel and audio versions via iTunes.

We also have our other content there to check out! If you’ve got any questions, suggestions or perhaps would like to see some detailed guides on how to use appear.in for your own vidcast please feel free to let us know via email or our social media platforms and if there is enough interest I shall look into creating a Video and Written guide to help out! A very special thanks for the entire team at appear.in for not only creating an amazing video platform, but also giving us the opportunity to write this post to perhaps help out some other people interested in starting up their own vidcast using appear.in!