Show HN: Macro – Customize your Zoom meeting interface | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Macro – Customize your Zoom meeting interface

macro.io

15 pointsrjkeck26 comments

Hey folks! My name is John and I’m one of the creators of Macro (https://macro.io). We allow Zoom users to customize their meeting interface with different UI modes, real-time airtime visualization, and dynamically synced note-taking.

My co-founder Ankith and I both realized how unproductive most meetings were while working everywhere from startups to Fortune 500 companies. As engineers, we thought we could use technology to fix that. We started gathering data around meeting effectiveness last year using a Slack integration at over 250 companies and found that people were having the most problems in virtual meetings (and this was before COVID and before the entire world was WFH!). Specifically, people felt like their voice wasn’t heard and they were missing next steps (or the entire point of the meeting). They felt that video meetings were frankly getting in the way of work instead of augmenting it.

We decided in December 2019 that we should use these customer learnings to build a new video interface that would fix the biggest issues. Instead of reinventing the wheel, we chose to build on top of the new Zoom SDK so we could piggyback on the best audio / video infrastructure around. Our initial launch focuses on showing airtime distribution in real time, giving users the ability to take GDoc-synced notes directly from the Zoom UI, and allowing users to pick different video modes for different meetings (like a mode with small bubbles at the top to pair program or design on Figma together).

It’s our first day live to the public and we’re excited to share the product with HN without any recently popularized ‘exclusive waitlist’. You can check us out and download (macOS only at the moment) at https://macro.io or just see more on Product Hunt and TechCrunch. We’re a small company of 5 and we’re rapidly iterating on the product every week so we’d love any and all feedback from the HN community!

Great work John. I have about 500 students learning programming remotely and have been looking for better remote presence alternatives. So far the issue is that other products reinventing the wheel are more resource intensive than Zoom (machine, internet). Working on top of Zoom is much smarter.

I know it's early, but my only other obstacle is that those students are mostly Windows or Ubuntu :/ Although I totally understand focusing on MacOS

Whoa that's a sick product! Also -- had no idea about the Zoom SDK. +1 kudos

Just downloaded! Can't wait to try it out.

Little Snitch reported that Macro wanted to send a request to hooks.slack.com—I'd imagine that you're posting a notice in your team's Slack when the tool is used?

Your on-boarding mentions your affinity for transparency, but this feels pretty shady to me. I've uninstalled the app.

We don't use any traditional third-party user tracking software so we do indeed use Slack webhooks to allow the leadership team to be notified about certain events (onboardings, uninstalls, etc.). No meeting data (name, attendees, or otherwise) are included in these requests.

If you've got any suggestions on how to debug client-side issues with more transparency in mind, I'd love to hear them!

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