Attachments and screen recordings, in tickets and in chat.

What it does

Every ticket and every message now takes attachments. Drag a file onto a ticket and it sits on the ticket. Paste a screenshot into chat and it posts inline. Nothing goes to a separate drive that someone has to be given access to later.

Alongside that there is a record button. It captures a tab, a window or the whole screen, with your camera in a small bubble if you want it and your microphone if you want that, and posts the result in the room you started from. The clip is also saved in Docs, so it stays findable after the conversation has moved on.

Why we built it before other things

The most common thing in a support conversation is a description of something visual. “The report is slow” and “the total is wrong on the second page” both take three rounds of questions to pin down, and both take about forty seconds to record.

It also fixes a leak in the model. A ticket is supposed to carry everything needed to pick up the work. If the evidence for the ticket lives in a chat thread, or in a folder on somebody’s machine, then the ticket does not actually carry the work — it carries a pointer to it.

How it works underneath

Recording uses the browser’s own capture API, so there is nothing to install and no desktop app. When you stop, the clip is uploaded and converted to an MP4 that plays everywhere, including phones. From Chrome that conversion takes about a second, because Chrome already records in the right format; Firefox records WebM and takes a little longer.

Files are stored per bothy behind signed links. A person who leaves a bothy loses access to its attachments at the same moment they lose access to everything else.

Where a clip lives

A recording is not a special object with its own tab. It is a document, of a third kind next to the markdown you write in the app and the files you upload. That means it gets everything a document already has: a collection, a project, an owner, the same edit and delete rules, and a place under the channel’s Docs tab when it was recorded in a project room.

The card in chat is the same clip, not a copy. Tap the title under the player and you are in Docs looking at it, with its length and who recorded it. Delete it there and the card in chat goes with it.

On a phone

Phone browsers do not allow screen capture, so the record button on a phone records the camera instead, which turns out to be the thing people want there anyway: a thirty-second explanation to camera beats a paragraph typed with thumbs. The composer on a phone puts attach, record and clock in behind a single plus button, so the message box keeps its width.

Photos from the camera roll go through the same attach path. Chrome and Safari on a phone hand over a JPEG, so what you attach is what everyone else sees.

What is not there yet

No trimming or editing of recordings — if you fluff it, record again. No automatic transcription, though it is the obvious next step and would make recordings searchable. And no screen capture from a phone, because phone browsers do not allow it; the phone records the camera instead.