What’s new at Scrimba

Google slides support, better Q&A section, updated design and much more!

As we haven’t written an update like this since November, some of you have probably already seen some of these features. However, we still want to sum up the stuff we’ve released so far this year.

We’ve had amazing progress so far this year, both technically and business wise. 40K developers have signed up to Scrimba to date, which we are super happy about, given that we had 5K users in December.

Let’s have a look at all the new awesome features.

1. Import slides to your screencast

We’re very excited to finally allow people to create slides. Just click Import from Google slides in the top right corner, and you’ll get your slideshow added to the screencast. This enhances the experience for students, as there are many concepts that are better explained through slides than by looking at code.

This is actually the easiest way ever to record and publish a slide show with a voice over.

We’re tracking the cursor inside the slideshow, so you can explain things in detail.

2. Ask questions about specific code snippets

This one is super cool. You can now ask questions directly related to specific lines of code. Just click ‘Ask a question’, select the code and write your question.

3. Design brushup

We’ve brushed up the overall design, especially on the front page, course pages and profile pages. There are still tons of things to fix on these, and this is just the first step in the direction we want to go.

4. Download the project as a zip

A lot of users want to be able to play with the code locally as well, so we’ve added the ability to download a zip of the screencasts.

Note that we’re doing some webpack magic on NPM projects, so if we’re using NPM libraries, you’ll get a README which explains how to run it locally. This requires that you have Node installed, as you’ll need to do npm start.

We’ve added the toggling of console and browser at the left sidebar. This makes is easier for you to open and close them.

6. Quick logging from the console

We’re thinking a lot about how to give the best teaching experience here at Scrimba. And one of our constant concerns is how to make sure the teacher has enough space to display their code. This space is constantly being threatened by the console, the browser window and the sidebars. So we’ve added a feature which allows you to have your console closed while still seeing the values you log to it.

7. Sidebar with metadata

We’ve added a sidebar at the right hand side, which you can open and close as you want. It includes info about the creator, a description of the cast, your notes and the Q&A section.

If you’re watching a course or a playlist, you’ll also see an overview of the other screencasts in the list here.

8. Sign up via email

A lot of people requested this, as not everybody use GitHub.

9. Adjust font size

You can now adjust the font size on the screencast. This is perfect for people with bad vision, or if you’d simply prefer having larger fonts. Note that this isn’t just for the creator, but for the viewer as well. And the recorded cursor will still work properly in the editor as well, even though you’ve completely changed the size of the code. Magic, or what?

And that’s is! Thanks a lot for reading.