Miro's annual Distributed conference has wrapped up! If you're anything like me, you're most interested in the new features and product announcements. That's what we'll look at in this post. So grab your coffee mug and let me give you a walkthrough of everything that's new.
1. Interactive Presentations
The presentation mode in Miro is being updated with a new design and more space within the app. Next to the "Share" button in the top right, there will be a new button inviting you to present the board. From there, you can choose between three ways to present:
- Board: You can freely move through the board and collaborators will follow your view in fullscreen.
- All frames: The traditional presentation experience, where you can move from one slide to the next in a predefined sequence.
- Smart Meetings: Add activities and apps (e.g Timer, Voting) for each slide to create a interactive workshop or meeting agenda
The audience view will also be updated. Reactions (Thumbs up, Hand raise, etc.) will now be easier to reach the bottom center of the screen. Depending on the mode, collaborators can also click a dedicated button to move away from the presentation and explore slides on their own before coming back to the presenter's view.
Then there is also a new feature for effortlessly switching between speakers. The main presenter can now hand off the presentation to another person on the board by selecting them from a dropdown. Then everyone else will follow the new speaker and their view automatically. This makes it easier for multiple people to present together in a large meeting.
[.box-highlight] How to try it out: This feature is now in beta. Sign up here to request access. [.box-highlight]
2. Talktrack
Talktrack was teased already in last year's Distributed. But now it's going into beta and will soon become accessible to the public. But what is Talktrack? Talktrack is a loom-like video recording feature with one kicker: The video is directly embedded into the board. That means, viewers can stop the video at any time and interact with the board.
If you ask me, I think Talktrack will be a complete game-changer. To understand why, let's just take a look at the many use cases where this might be helpful. (taken from Miro's help article)
- Meeting pre-reads and recaps
- Weekly team updates
- Stand-in recording for meetings you cannot attend
- Onboarding people to new processes or information
- Pre-workshop/class instructions
- Gathering feedback on your board content
- Sharing a project plan or roadmap
Overall, this feature will enable true asynchronous communication within teams that use Miro. And that could help to save a meeting or two per week.
[.box-highlight] How to try it out: This feature is now in beta. Sign up here to request access. [.box-highlight]
3. Miro Workspaces
Miro Workspaces is a new way to embed up-to-date content from other tools right inside Miro. With these new capabilities, you will be able to turn any Miro board into a custom dashboard. This sounds very interesting. But the marketing is a bit further here than the implementation. At the moment, this feature is limited by the small number of integrations. At the moment these integrations are: Looker, Grafana, Confluence, YouTube and a handful more. Nonetheless, Miro emphasized this feature a lot, and that means we can expect to see more on this front in the future. For now, we have to wait for the beta to get access.
[.box-highlight] How to try it out: This feature is now in beta. Sign up here to request access. [.box-highlight]
4. Collapsible mind map branches
A small, but a helpful feature: It's now possible to collapse and expand branches of mind maps. If you are coming from more advanced mind mapping apps like Mindmeister, this is absolutely essential to work with large mind maps. So great that it's now live in Miro.
[.box-highlight] How to try it out: Search for the Mind Map app and create a couple branches. Then click on a branch to collapse or expand it. [.box-highlight]
5. Code Block
There is now a dedicated Code Block app in Miro to display and format snippets of code. With syntax highlighting for popular languages like HTML, JavaScript, Python, Java, and many more. Engineers will appreciate this to discuss code or even do some pair-programming together in Miro.
[.box-highlight] How to try it out: Search for the Code Block app and drag it to the board.[.box-highlight]
6. Image Masking and Borders
It has always been possible to crop images. But what if you want to have an image within a circle? For a long time, you had to find another tool to solve that problem for you. Now you can do this all in Miro. With a couple of clicks, you can choose a mask (e.g Circle) and bring your images into the right shape. And you can also add decorative borders to it, if you like.
[.box-highlight] How to try it out: Upload an image and click on the crop icon. From there, choose one of the masks to give your image another shape. [.box-highlight]
7. Paste as a table
People are often surprised to learn, that it's possible to copy content from Google Sheets or Excel straight into Miro. With a new update to this feature, it's possible now to choose between "Paste as a table" and "Paste as sticky notes". Also, good to know. You can do this in the reverse as well. For example, you can copy sticky notes in Miro and then paste them into Google Sheets and Excel.
[.box-highlight] How to try it out: Simply copy and paste a sheet into the board. [.box-highlight]
8. Localization
Miro is used by companies and individuals across the globe. But so far, Miro has only been available with an English user interface. This is about to change as Miro is rolling out the app in more languages. French, German, Spanish, and Japanese are already available. With more languages being added soon.
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That's it for this year's large announcement. If you ask me, I'm most excited to get access to Talktrack. I can picture myself actually using this in my day-to-day Miro work. After that, I will explore the capabilities of Interactive Presentations to see how that might help to create more engaging and productive meetings.
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