Overall it is pretty simple to use with a decent UI and worked fine for my quick test of a Signal desktop app video call by selecting the mmhmm virtual camera in Signal.
It did not work in FaceTime as there is no way to change the camera from the built in one (however I was able to change the audio source to mmhmm audio fwiw). Not sure if this is a FaceTime limitation or mmhmm?
For £20 I would probably buy it but £10 a month (or £100 a year)?! No. Sorry.
I fail to see why this type of application needs to be a subscription service and a rather expensive one at that. Unless I am missing something it doesn't rely on a backend service the mmhmm developers would need to maintain and outside of adding new features it isn't likely the OS APIs used to access the camera will change much, if at all, on a desktop OS these days so on going development costs to the core camera functionality already present is likely to be minimal.
A nice product but not worth an indefinite £10 a month to me personally.
[1] Also there does not appear to be a delete account option anywhere on the website. I hate this when forced to sign up just to try the software. I have emailed using the address on their website to request deletion but it should be a clear option on the account management page.
[2] Also accepting an 8 character minimum (requiring upper, lower and special character) password while rejecting a 4 word (27 character) passphrase is laughable.
From a software dev perspective, I definitely understand the benefit of monthly/yearly subscriptions vs feast and famine cycles (with the hope that you can justify an upgrade to your users), but it.has.gotten.out.of.hand.
Some of your best customers start out bootstrapping and becoming experts in the cheapest (workable) solution. If you tell them they’re “too poor” for not wanting to pay your prices at the door, you just lose out.
With an excellent product, it’s even viable to have free tiers and then charge businesses $$$ (basically all past Windows software if you count piracy as free), or move to a Patreon/sponsorship model (Vue.js).
If you have to pay “cloud” costs, I get the struggle of giving it away for free, but if it’s all on-device? What’s your argument?
Why, as a customer, would you care about my “argument” for my price as opposed to the value it creates for you?
This product is expensive and I expect most people to walk away but I also see why they don’t want to go down the old Windows 3.1 route of a perpetual license.
Supporting MacOS with anything that needs kernel drivers requires constant updates and the potential market is so small that it kind of needs to be expensive per customer or else you need to cut corners with the quality.
Windows has 5x the market share, so there you can sell for 80% less per user because you'll sell more licenses which compensates that. And a windows version for $2 per month sounds fair, so then $10 monthly on Mac is fair, too.
Not to mention there are plenty of cross platform libraries for real time audio where you would never need to care about the difference.
It get's really silly to the point that a snipping app has a yearly subscription (xnip), calendars have subscriptions (fantastical) and many other tools which once would have been a $20-$30 purchase all now want $3-$10 a month.
Personally I'm sick of it. I'd rather go back to the 'old days'...
If clients are willing to pay less than the value of the resources necessary to build and maintain the product, you have either a communication problem (you're not showing the right value to your clients), or a market fit problem.
The vagaries of doing real time audio on Macs don't have much weight on the price people will pay.
Is $100/yr too much? A b2b sales team might spend $400 getting a first meeting with a customer, and $10k more over the course of further meetings. A 1h internal meeting with 10 people might cost thousands in wages. If mmhmm makes a handful of meetings marginally more effective it will pay for itself.
If the product works but the price doesn't, you may not be the intended buyer.
Isn’t that true of all things you purchase?
- Be the star you are!
- Level up your presentations!
- Make high-quality video content in minutes!
- Direct everyone's attention!
What do you guys offer? Bullhorns? Public speaking training? Pro camera rental?
I feel like an old fart.
If you have something worthwhile or compelling to say, that will stand on its own.
I saw the phrase next to the bouncing down arrow and I thought it meant that when I scrolled down, things would zoom around on the screen. Or something.
Perhaps my mind had been primed for that by this discussion from the other day:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25191802
It honestly did not occur to me that the phrase had something to do with Zoom meetings. I use Zoom nearly every day but I'd never heard of Zooming before.
But then again, I rarely use Zoom since my company is beholden to Gsuite.
For a product about presentation, their presentation needs a lot of work.
Also the price is utterly ridiculous. When I thought it was a full video conferencing suite I was on the fence about it "possibly" being worth USD$10/mth, but as a pure virtual-video-editor it's maybe worth $20-40 once-off and definitely not worth any form of subscription.
They just came out of beta and announced that it would cost $9.99/month. I was pretty shocked to see a recurring fee for such a simple app, which, from what I could tell, offers nothing new over a long establish FOSS project. It strikes me as more of a one time $10 purchase. Would really like to hear how they justify a recurring cost on this.
But I think that is only a temporary problem kind of. And don’t know if Mmhmm would perform any better on it.
The new MacBook Air and Pro models with the M1 chip on the other hand I think from what I have heard make video encoding really fast. Would love to hear from anyone using OBS on one of these models, which machine you have and how OBS has been for you.
I do a lot of online meetings, and make regular internal presentations about our engineering work to the rest of the company. I have used OBS, and it does work, but it is complex enough and fiddly enough that operating it distracts me from my presentation.
This mmhmm app lets me do the key things OBS does – shrink myself to a corner of the window, with my presentation taking up the whole screen, jump to a live demo while keeping me in the corner — more simply, so that it is not a distraction to what I am presenting or demoing.
I use it every week. I work remotely, so these meetings are how I present myself at work. In that context, $10 a month is nothing; it doesn't even merit a second's hesitation.
One downside to be aware of is that it routes your slides/screenshare through your webcam video feed.
In some apps (e.g. Teams) this can dramatically reduce the quality of the slides, relative to a 'normal' screenshare.
There's a setting in Teams to increase video bandwidth, which mitigates this a bit. But the slides will still look less good (at least, that's what people have told me).
There's also a mix of compatibility - generally if you access the video conference in your web browser it works (because the browser can see the 'software' webcam they've set up), but the software webcam is inaccessible in some desktop apps.
They let you present a window that includes whatever is in your mmhmm video feed. It is the same content as your virtual mmhmm camera, but it comes across as a presentation, in higher resolution so the other participants can read your slides.
It is also very easy to find in apps like Meet when you use the "Present Now" function, because the window title is all-caps "SHARE THIS". :)
(The window doesn't appear on the screen, but it does appear in apps that let you present — I have tried it with Meet and Zoom.)
Really excited at the possibility here. Staying tuned...
I discovered this when I was setting up for a very important presentation and had about 5 minutes to go to a fallback plan. I was pretty upset that there was no warning about this, since they were totally aware of it, and it completely undermined the value of using it in a live presentation.
Later, I had to record a presentation to submit for a conference. I used it there and it worked fine in terms of quality. But even though I had bought a green screen, there were difficulties that resulted in subpar edge detection. I had to change my shirt multiple times to create enough contrast, and I had to use a background image that was ‘busy’ enough to mask the static that was visible.
Maybe things have improved in the last couple months, but I was pretty let down when I tried this out.
Thanks for your concern though!
While waiting for MmHmm's invite, I got invited to try Around[3]. I haven't tried MmHmm but it seems to share similar features with Around. I find Around nifty while pitching prospective customers but rather too-much-ado for, say, our team meetings - face-to-face visual meetings with audio.
After a while, all the bells and whistles wares down and we want to just stay at the basics. Just my thoughts from our small team's experience.
It /sounds/ neat, and the AI framing is interesting, the presenters head bobbing around was so distracting that I could barely keep focused on the content. It was recorded, so sadly he could not do anything about it as we were seeing it, and the chat box was full up with people asking him to turn it off.
It's kind of bad for discovery.
Still, it's blowing up.
I made the opposite conclusion from your anecdote.
> it took a long explanation to describe
This strikes me as a good thing for this sort of product.
As someone who has done quite a bit of pretty successful product and company naming, the choice "Mmhmm" has quite a few negative aspects which I consider to be fairly important, though not requirements.
* Hard to only hear first then spell correctly.
* Hard to only read first then pronounce confidently.
* Hard to find when searched, even in combination with other likely terms (e.g. video, streaming, app).
* Can be confusing when introduced as a new-ish term in conversation.
* Such a notably 'unique' name can trigger discussion about the name itself which can lead to distraction or delay in communicating the product's value prop (as seen in the first third of their own intro video).
* Even for those who may find it "clever" or "cute" initially, it will likely become annoying over time for those in the company as well as the company's most valuable stakeholders.
Against that, the upsides don't appear (IMHO) to be a good trade-off.
* Short
* Quick to say
* Unique
* Memorable (at least on the verbal dimension, if not written)
* The domain was apparently affordable.
But a subscription? £10 a month? No thanks. _Maybe_ £5 max.
That price is competing with stuff like Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, Netflix, HBO and many others that give me hours of entertainment every day.
I've gone to a couple online networking events recently and there's always some people with video modifications that turn them into an unbelievably tacky advert.
The product looks great, by the way.
Other remarks:
Good:
- Seems fun to use and build things, liked the humor Needs improvement:
- UI could be cleaner, the nagging about free premium takes a huge part of screen real state
Bad:
- No support to use google slides, powerpoint or keynote. If you think I will spend time redoing my slides in your tool, forget it. It just made me so pissed off that I deleted the app from my mac right away.
- Pricing should be transparent. No free tier (even with a watermark) is a huge bummer.
- Performance in older macs is subpar. My video slurred a lot in a 2015 Macbook 12'
If they can’t, Zoom and others will add the same features if a large number of people find them valuable.
So I’m baffled that they are trying to monetize this already especially since they recently closed ~$30mm. Happy to hear other opinions.
the pitch seems jarring
but other people seem to have corporate workplace uses for it and that's a bigger audience so maybe have at it!
imo, mmhmm is simple and is really good for presentations in my experience, so perfect fit for corporate workplace crowd
Probably the same people that include emojis in business emails.
Probably the same people that would include emojis in IRC messages.
One thing worth mentioning: it's a bit tricky to uninstall. Still appears as a camera in your system after uninstall. Had to go in manually and delete a bunch of preferences.
> A Screen share slide is also a great way to show the screen of your iPhone or iPad to quickly demo an app, for example. To use your device in a Screen share, first plug it into your computer, then select it with “Add Screen Share”.
This potentially provides an easy way to use your far better iPhone camera as an external webcam for your Mac.
https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/03/26/tip-record-your-i...
'What it is' needs to be clear very quickly or people won't go any further and 'Makes your Zoom calls fun' is not 'what it is'.
Finally, the video gets showcase pretty fast, with so much exemplary items, please just within 10 seconds explain what it is, give some basic examples.
That said, screen sharing hasn't worked since the app update released on the 16th and I'm finding it impossible to get a response from mmhmm's support (or anyone that works there, honestly).
So far I really like both how easy it is to record the sessions with it, as well as how I can quickly switch between sharing my computer screen and iPad screen (using AirServer).
A nice addition being that the recordings will contain my head talking in the corner of the screen.
I think I managed to remove the background in a really, really crud way with OBS studio. Like using a chroma key (green screen). But Xplit does it with any noisy apartment background.
This space is witnessing a lot of innovation and disruption and time is also ripe to do so.
Hoping to see AR/VR bring next wave of disruptions.
"Mmhmm is the newest product by All Turtles, a mission-driven product studio that works to solve meaningful problems worldwide."
Didn't know backgrounds for Zoom are meaningful problems that need to be solved.
That's a pretty strong presumption that that is what this software does.
This is a game changer for online workshops and conferences, if not anything else for the ability to prepare several "shared screens" and switch between them as if switching between presentation slides.
The only feature I was surprised is not included is the ability to "save" the video size and position for each slide, so it automatically appears in the right place, out of the way.
Yes, do this on iOS or Android or Electron.
Edit: perhaps with some difficulty for the last hop to a virtual device on Electron, to be fair.
Note: OBS is not hard at all, so I might be looking for something less CPU/GPU intensive
Engagement metrics, click ratios and all this fricking noise - I want us to go back when watching the History channel on TV was actually about History. There are a handful of video content producers on the internet that I can watch without getting my blood pressure out of control.
Either way, the whole "Funner Zoom" line is off-putting, if the problem isn't to be exemplified by the app as a whole, your point can at least be made in regard to that piece of it.
