What’s up, world! Today at Dashcam, we’re hyped to show off our redesigned and souped-up app. This spruced-up version — (here’s the download link, you know you want to) — was born out of necessity to get down with the cool, remote work, async, video-first world we live in!

We ended up like that classic car rebuild project you start in your garage, and it somehow turns into a full-blown Batmobile!

Now you might be wondering: how did a simple idea transform into a makeover montage straight out of a movie? It all began when we realized we used two/three apps to do the same thing: screen recording & narrated screen recording .

Times are changing; everyone’s using video everywhere because it’s worth more than writing a huge paragraph of text.

The timeline for this tech evolution kept changing faster than fashion trends, but one thing was clear: video is here to stay, and your voice can make a clip more engaging than a paragraph of text.

A “makeover” is a big deal and was needed.

Is the dashcam feature going away?

Dashcam’s continuous screen recording has been a core part since our baby steps, to build a remote-first, distributed team working on developer tools to make bug reporting painless. That’s not going away. It’s on by default.

When we realized we had more to offer the world with voice + video, the Dashcam squad decided that it was time to step up our game for our customers.

Taking a cue from life-hacker wisdom, we turned a challenge into an opportunity to improve this tool for our users and Dashcam. So yeah, this makeover was inevitable, but we’ve gone beyond just a new paint job to make it the most user-friendly release to date.

What this means for our customers

You just unlocked a bunch of new scenarios where you can use Dashcam now

Code Reviews: Record your screen with narration. Explaining complex logic or design decisions. The video can then be shared with team members who can review it independently.

Bug Reporting: When a bug is found, it can often be helpful to show and explain with voice exactly what’s going wrong. With Dashcam, engineers can record a video of the bug in action, add context with words. This makes it easier for others to understand and fix the issue.

Documentation: For complex systems, written documentation may not be enough. Engineers can use Dashcam to create video walkthroughs of systems or processes. This can be particularly useful for onboarding new team members as you build a library of clips in your Workspace.

Collaboration: Dashcam can be used to share ideas or proposals more personally and engagingly than text. This can help to facilitate discussion and collaboration within a team.

Asynchronous Communication: Dashcam videos can be a great way to communicate asynchronously in distributed teams. Team members can create and watch videos when convenient for them, reducing the need for scheduling meetings.

Demoing Features: When a new feature is developed, engineers can use Dashcam to record a demo of the feature. This can then be shared with stakeholders or other team members to show how the feature works. You’re in control of who views your video with granular video permission

What else have we added: Title, description, icons

You can now set your clip’s title and description directly in the Clip editor before uploading. This saves you some time and plays nicely with our Jira integration, which creates a ticket with the embedded clip and metadata in your project for you on upload.

We have also added nice icons to provide more context to your clips, this will be part 1 of a series of updates to indexing and searching clips that is coming out later.

We hope you’ll find Dascham’s updates! We’ve worked hard to get here, but we still slapped the Beta label on this release as we will be improving these features (and more) throughout the summer!
Thanks for reading & until next time!