We're now coming to the end of 2021 and the end of our Early Access phase. Thank you to all you early adopters who subscribed this year to support the development of Metro Retro, and welcome to everyone who started an Early Access trial!

This release has a range of updates across the tool, not least the Christmas decorations. We're not sure if we're more excited for Christmas or the official launch of Metro Retro v2 early next year! Until then, here's the updates in full:

Christmas Mode!

Christmas decorations have been applied to everyone's boards. This can be turned off from the Settings - enable 'Scrooge Mode' to hide them. There is also a three-part Christmas retrospective template for you to use with your team:

New templates

We've been adding new templates to the tool in the last month, and plan to add many more soon. Use the comment box to let us know what templates you would like to see in Metro Retro!

Picture templates:

• Big Christmas Retro
• The Good, The Bad, The Ugly
• Three Little Pigs
• Ishikawa (Fishbone) diagram

Other retro formats:

• Wishes, Risks, Appreciation, Puzzles
• Keep, Problems, Try
• I Like, I Wish, What If

Other collaboration templates:

• Crazy 8's sketching
• Collaborative Drawing icebreakers
• MoSCoW prioritization
• Monthly Calendar

Tutorials And Guides

There are 4 new tutorial boards to learn from - from the basics through to advanced facilitation. Find these in the Help Menu or in Templates.

Invite team members by email

You can now invite team members to your Organization Account by email, from inside a workspace or in the Admin area.

Admin Approvals

If there is an invite made to new people whose email address doesn't match your security settings, an Admin will need to approve the invite request. They will be notified by email.

Usability updates to the Dashboard

1. Recent Boards now shows when you last visited a board, and the workspace it is in.
2. Workspace lists are collapsible.
3. When cloning a board, you can now move it to another workspace in one action.

Object manipulation updates

A few updates to make editing the board layout easier:

1. Hold shift when rotating a shape for easier alignment.
2. Hold shift when moving a shape to move it along its horizontal or vertical axis only.
3. Hold the Alt key and drag from an object to create a clone.
4. Press the 1 or 2 number keys when you have multiple items selected to arrange them vertically or horizontally.
5. Shapes and images can now be set to ‘contain’ other items, or not. This setting means they can either contain either objects or be a flat shape.
6. Resizing shapes no longer affects the objects inside them

Embed Videos in boards

Embed videos into boards by pasting the link directly into the board. This works for YouTube videos and videos hosted elsewhere. You can see examples of embedded videos in the Tutorial boards.

Emoticons in shapes

Shapes can now have emoticons in them - this is the same mechanism as tokens. Double click a shape and type one of the 50 custom emoticons. Try typing <:-) in a shape.

Adjust thickness of marker pen with number keys

Using number keys 1-8 will adjust the marker pen thickness when it is equipped.

Hot on the heels of last week's sneak-preview, here's some features we're excited about and can't wait for you to try!

The star of this release is the first ever iteration of the Planning Poker and T-shirt Sizing workshops, decked out with real playing cards!

Watch just the first 10 seconds of this tutorial to see why we're excited:

We've added tutorial videos inside the templates to show you how to use them (oh that's another new feature - embedding YouTube videos into boards).

The two templates can be found in the Planning and Estimation category. Go try them out and tell us what you think:

Improved Drawing

We've upgraded the marker pen, so you can now draw on zones and shapes of any size, adjust the size of the marker, and there's an eraser for when it all goes wrong:

Embed Youtube videos

This is a beta feature, but if you paste a YouTube link onto a board, it will embed the video in the board. We're classing this as beta because the controls are limited to play/stop for now 🤦‍♂️.

If you need to move or adjust the size of an embedded YouTube video, hold the SHIFT key and click on it to get the selection/transform controls.

'Apply zone settings' command

We had a request this week: 

"When we move stickies out of a zone, we lose the context of the color that it was previously - is there any way to 'burn' the color on to those sticky notes?"

So there is now a command that you can run through the the Command Palette to do just this (Ctrl + Space to open):

Your Feature Requests...

If you have any feature requests, please do send them in! We're heading into a busy November and December, and have these things on the horizon:

Community-contributed templates

We're experimenting with opening up template contributions to the community. Talk to us if you'd like to contribute the first templates to Metro Retro.

Picture templates

We've got some more picture templates coming down the line. Tell us if there's any template or meeting formats that you would love to see in Metro Retro.

Stability Improvements

Not very sexy, but entirely necessary.  We're going to be dedicating some time in the next few months to improving reliability and stability of the tool.

Release #45 of Metro Retro Early Access has landed.  The landing was a little rough, apologies if you got caught in the small period where the board was not clickable or show/hide was missing... Messing with z-layers at the last minute was a mistake!

Our team retrospective this week will probably include "release smaller updates" somewhere in the notes.  We got a bit carried away with this one.  So much so that we have decided to split the usual video into two, with the second video focusing on the beta/experimental features.  Anyway, without further ado, the notes video and notes:

Waiting Room & Organization Access Control

We've done a few things that will streamline getting people into your organization spaces and boards:

1. People can now automatically join your organization when you share a link to a board with them.  This works off an email domain whitelist available in the new Access Control section of the admin screen.  
2. If a person is not whitelisted they will see a "Request Access" option that will email administrators requesting permission to join the orgnanization.
3. Once in, if a person does not have access to a board, they can now "Ask to join" which will notify anyone on the board that they want permission to join and show their information in the new waiting room widget.

Organization Template Library

There is now a shared template library for the entire organization. Add boards to the template library and everyone in the organisation can use them. Useful if you have branded boards or sets of templates you want everyone to use.

Live Now

I actually forgot to mention this one in the video...  The waiting room functionality required an extension to our collaboration system that means that we can share which users are on which boards with members of the organization even if they are themselves not on the board.  

This means we can add the participant indicators to the dashboard previews, showing who is online, but also powers the Live Now view.  Originally, this was just for me and Jamie to test and debug, however it was so useful for us day to day that we have decided to keep it.  Our plan is to eventually roll it into a more useful Home screen (merging with Recent Boards), but for now if you want to use it to find your colleagues, it's there.  

Any private boards will show up as private (no title or preview) so that your protected information is still safe.  Anyone trying to join will go via the waiting room functionality.

Improved Board Create UI

The template browser and board/folder creation buttons have been overhauled to make them easier to use and more pleasing to look at.  The new template browser also automatically includes any boards you add to the Template Library mentioned above.

Time Machine [beta]

You can now step back through the history of each of your boards using the Time Machine function in the bottom left of the board view.  This feature is functional but not polished, so expect bugs.  In it's current form it's possible to scrub through the timeline and pull out objects that were deleted or lost by selecting them and using the copy/paste functionality to bring them into your present board.  In the future we will add more explicit restoration functionality.

Note: this should be compatible with all your existing boards.  We would be grateful if you could report any errors you happen upon.

Hands Concept & Planning Poker [beta]

This release includes a new board function called "hands".  It's inspired by mechanics from digital board games and basically lets you virtually "hold" board objects in front of you as if you were holding a hand of cards.  You can hold anything on the board at the moment, but large items will cause erratic behaviour.  For now we have added a planning poker template with the function enabled.  Check out the video for information on how it works:

Click here to view the Release Video

This release is packed with new features and updates!

The updates range from extremely productive (import and export) to the lighter side of teamwork (slapping).

Headlines

1. You can now reveal sticky notes one-by-one by clicking the red/green icon at the top of a sticky note. Tip - There must be a 'meeting' enabled to do this.
2. Drop .csv files or paste a table into your board, and map the data against sticky notes, zones, and groups.
   Use this to import backlog items and run prioritization exercises, or to visualise data sets (like customer feedback). Watch the release video from 07:40 for a quick demo.
3. Export your board content to .csv, table, markdown, or JSON.
   Select the objects you want to export and choose your columns. Tip - use HTML table to paste directly into Confluence.
4. Font Settings - turn off handwriting fonts, making sticky notes easier to read.
5. Mouse settings - Metro Retro tries to guess which device you’re using, but doesn't always get it right. You can now choose between mouse and trackpad settings.
6. Slapping settings - Slapping is back! To slap someone, hold the space bar and fling your cursor through their avatar to send them flying (with bonus sound effects). If you find slaps annoying, disable them in the user settings.
7. Lock layout - a new option in the right-click menu. Use 'Lock layout' to lock only your board layout objects - zones, text, images and shapes.
8. Import v1 boards - you can now import all your lovingly-created v1 boards into your team space. Click the workspace name to find the option in the dropdown menu.
   Tip - the sticky notes in v2 are 25% bigger, so they may be a little squashed together compared to v1. Watch the release video from 02:40 for a quick guide.

Improvements

1. Pasting behaviour has improved. Depending on your camera position, objects will either be pasted on top of the originals, or in the center of your camera view. Cloning behaviour (Alt + arrow key on a selected object) has also been improved.
2. Now, the first time you enter a board your camera position will be set to show all the board content. Previously you were zoomed in to the center of the board.
3. Now the person that copy/pastes or clones stickies will become the creator of the new stickies.
4. Ctrl + A now selects everything on the board. A command has also been added to the right-click menu.
5. ‘Select other’ - new option in right-click menu. If you select an object and use this command, it will select everything of the same type on the board.
6. SSO improvement - Admins can now set a property to allow or block entry by people not in their SSO provider's list.
7. On smaller screens the toolbar now re-sizes to fit.
8. We’ve made boards faster to load.

Bug fixes

1. Fixed issues with copy and paste in Firefox.
2. Non-Latin characters weren’t being hidden in private sticky notes.
3. Fixed a number of usability issues with text, shapes and the floating toolbars.

Click here to view the Release Video

• Added a context menu to the editor.
• Improved locking behavior. ALT key no longer required, locked objects can be selected with a single click and unlocked to edit. When in meeting mode, only facilitators can unlock.
• Added auto scroll when moving an object to the edge of the screen.
• Added support for Single Sign-On (via SAML2). Please speak to use if you would like to set this up for your account.
• Fixed bug with field length when renaming a board.
• Fixed various styling issues.

Click here to view the Release Video

• Freestyle Mode now available as a faster and easier meeting setup alternative.
• Reworked in-meeting UI to enable quicker adjustments.
• Renamed "Phases" to "Activities" because we think it's less sterile.
• Added visibility indicators to stickies so you can see what is hidden/visible.
• Transforming shapes now supports mirroring (resizing negatively).
• Improved transformation net (made it thinner and drop nodes when no space).
• [Experimental] Added Stopwatch element (see video).
• [Experimental] Added TaskCard element (see video).
• Various small bugs and UI tweaks.

Click here to view the v41 Release Video

• Fixed bug with users editing box showing out of position sometimes.
• Zones now do not respond to mouse interactions unless over an edge or the title area.
• Added shortcuts for tools.
• Active tool is now highlighted in toolbox.
• Text tool font size now defaults to sane value based on zoom level.
• Shape tool now remembers previous selections settings unless a new shape is selected.
• You can paste sticky notes from notepad again.
• Marker tool has been improved (now shows drawing progress).
• Token support for regular emoji has been improved (linked to Reaction tool).
• Fixed a lot of bugs related to nested scaling of elements (resizing parent and child, resizing across parent boundaries).
• Fixed issue with copy pasting SVG images (you can now copy SVG and paste from Figma).
• Fixed issue dragging images from web pages into boards (you should be able to drag/drop from Google Images now).

Hi all, sorry this release was delayed a week due to stuff. The next one should be more timely.

• Added Spotlight (click on entries in the participant list to activate):

• Added voting on Topics.
• Added voting ranks/medals overlay (with support for view by Topic):

• Fixed Clone Board failing when on Recent view.
• Fixed some other small issues with Recent view.
• Fixed some Safari issues with certain scrollable UI (e.g. templates).
• Tool cursors now don't bug out and disappear randomly.

• Fixed dumb bug with invite links appearing valid but really they were expired (sorry everyone).
• Improved account invite system so you can restrict links and auto add to workspaces.
• Added ability to edit current meeting when using meeting creator.
• Added ability to set welcome message and lock meeting (and board) until facilitator is ready.
• Added ability re-order / delete meeting phases.
• Fixed various bugs with meeting timer.
• Tweaked editor loading sequence.

• Fixed z-ordering getting messed up sometimes when copy pasting.
• Fixed crash when pressing backspace while editing zone emoji.
• Fixed crash related to re-ordering of objects from different parents.