Hello friends—and Happy Halloween, if you celebrate! 🕸️

We’ve been super busy at Octopus Think headquarters lately. (Robots may or may not have been involved.) We’ve got a new app ready for you to beta-test, a new Mic Drop release with a bunch of features you’ve been asking for, and all sorts of things quietly brewing. 🧙🏾‍♀️

Mic Drop 3.2

We planned for this to be a tiny little patch release—but then we kept adding features, and suddenly we found ourselves with a bunch of stuff worth talking about.

• Mic Check is now completely resizable and a whole lot easier to use. Watch out for creepy-crawlies! 🕷️

• Some of you have mentioned wanting Mic Drop in your Dock. Done! 🪄

• Mic Drop is now available in ten different languages. Our Russian isn’t the best, so please do let us know if you spot an iffy translation anywhere, and we’ll fix it right away!

Read more about 3.2 in our launch post or get it on the App Store.

Mic Drop for Google Meet

If you’re a Google Meet user, you might be familiar with that little popup that says your system mic is muted and absolutely refuses to go away.

Well—poof!—no more, with our new Chrome extension! It runs in Chromium-based browser and allows Mic Drop to talk to Meet, so your mute state will always be synced properly. As always, it’s completely private: it only passes your mute status between Mic Drop and Meet, and never listens to, records, or sends your audio anywhere.

Mic Drop’s Chrome extension requires version 3.2, so make sure you have the most recent version of Mic Drop, and download the extension from the Chrome Web Store.

As always, we’d ❤️ to hear your feedback!

A brand-new app for run nerds, now in beta

Last but not least, we’re ready to announce our newest app: Tortoise Forecast, a weather app for runners.

We’re both dyed-in-the-wool run enthusiasts who eschew the treadmill, so we’re out there every day, rain, shine, or hurricane. We built Tortoise Forecast, like all of our other apps, to solve our own problem: weather apps just didn’t tell us everything we needed to know as we were heading out the door for a run.

Tortoise Forecast looks at everything that’s going on with the weather—wind, sun, humidity, temperature, precipitation, crazy storms—and gives every hour a rating from 1 to 10 based on how nice we think it’ll be.

That number is based on a lot of research (reading scientific papers about how snow intensity is calculated and the effects of temperature on human athletic performance) and a lot of field work (going outside and running!). It also tells you how long you have until last light—pretty critical if you’re a rural sunset runner like Sarah.

And why Tortoise? Well, don’t tell anyone, but we have a lot of ideas for other run apps rattling around our heads. So you may well see more Tortoise apps coming your way in the near future.

Now that Sarah’s out for the season (maybe longer) with a sesamoid fracture, we’re in need of more beta testers. Come and join us! It’s free, and all you need is an iPhone running iOS 18.5 or later.

Learn more about Tortoise Forecast or join the TestFlight beta.

As always, we’d love to know what you think. Hit reply to send us a message.

❤️ and 🐙 and 👻, Sarah and Matt