Here at Showbie HQ we’re always working hard on that next big feature that we hope will finally complete your teaching life, or cause your students to spontaneously burst into song, or convince your principal/headmaster to give you that promotion, since you were the smart one who decided to start using Showbie in the first place.

Sometimes, though, we take a step back and say “gee, there are a few nice improvements and refinements sitting here ready to go. Maybe it won’t change anyone’s life, but we should probably just release this stuff now, as a lot of teachers and students might appreciate it. Then we can get back to the next big thing.”

So it is with Showbie 1.5.3.

iOS8 Document Picker in Showbie

The great thing about this version is that, if you’re on iOS8, you can now add files to an assignment folder directly from a cloud document provider like iCloud Drive, Google Drive, or Dropbox.

Say you use Pages or Keynote a lot and you have your iWork documents stored in iCloud Drive. Now all you need to do is tap the ‘+’ button in Showbie, tap the iCloud button, and pick any file stored in your iCloud Drive to import directly to the Showbie assignment of your choice.

iCloud Document Picker in Showbie

Likewise, if you use Google Drive for document storage or Google Docs for word-processing, all of these files are available to add to an assignment in just a couple of taps. And as soon as you add a Google Doc to your assignment folder, you and your students can annotate it with Showbie’s built-in tools.

Apart from iOS8 document providers, this version includes quite a few smaller features and enhancements:

  • We’ve improved VoiceOver support in the app, so that Showbie is more accessible to visually impaired teachers and students.
  • Our ePub viewer now properly displays single-page-spread documents and has better text formatting for non-paginated ePub files.
  • Our Share Extension is now compatible with Evernote.
  • Pinned text notes on documents are now shown/hidden in accordance with your layer display settings.
  • We fixed several of the most common bugs and crashes.
  • We remedied about 40 tiny visual imperfections in the app interface. How many can you spot?

In closing, we hope you like Showbie 1.5.3, and we’re pretty confident that Showbie 1.6 might just complete your teaching life and cause your students to spontaneously burst into song. So stay tuned!

Showbie 1.5.3 is available now in the App Store.

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