Mmhmm App Wants to Make Video Conferencing Cool

While video conferencing and virtual meetings have become part of the new normal due to the coronavirus pandemic, the overall experience might seem mundane to some. In an attempt to make video calls cool and appealing to the masses, former Evernote CEO Phil Libin has launched an app called Mmhmm, calling it a “brand new way to perform and present on video and look great doing it.”

Mmhmm isn’t yet another video conferencing platform. Instead, it aims to step up your current video calling and webinar experience. It works with leading services such as Zoom, Google Meet, and more.

For starters, you can control the background with Mmhmm – a feature that a lot of platforms have been adding lately. You can also select animated backgrounds with the application.

The app lets you shrink, make yourself translucent so that the audience can see the content in the background, or even make your body disappear completely while you’re in the middle of a presentation.

The secret ingredient of Mmhmm, however, is its usability. You can seamlessly show or present the content you want with handy trackpad gestures. Notable gestures include clicking and dragging your head to move around, pinching and zooming on the trackpad to shrink and grow, and scrolling with two fingers to fade away.

For all the keyboard shortcut junkies out there, Space bar toggles between the “default” slide view and “full-frame” slide view, Command key with / (⌘-/) toggles slides on and off, right and left arrow keys help move to the next and previous slides, Command Key with R (⌘-R) resets the video, and ⌘-1 through ⌘-9 helps you quickly switch between the first nine rooms on Mmhmm.

There’s a feature the company calls Dynamic Decks that seamlessly lets you control slides in real-time. You can even send a recorded video that the audience can check out. That’s complemented with a Multiplayer mode for group presentations. If presentations are not really your thing, you can use the background to showcase web pages or screen recordings for UI demos and reviews.

Mmhmm is currently in early invite-only beta for macOS Catalina (10.15). If you’re interested, you can sign up for the beta here. The company is currently working on Windows & mobile apps and hopes to release the finalized product this fall.