Hi everyone,

Metro Retro v2.48 is here and brings self-serve billing support and payment integration.   With this update you can now start a trial, subscribe to a plan and manage your subscription all from within the new Billing section of the admin area.

We've also made some performance improvements to the dashboard, some minor bug fixes and UI tweaks as well as some architectural updates to help with system stability.  Ironically, some of these updates have caused a few teething issues at the start of the week - apologies if you were affected by any of these.  They should help us provide a more reliable service as we move towards ending our Early Access program.

Read on for more detail, as well as a look at what we are doing next!

Billing Management - found in your Admin area!

Plan & Subscription Management

Teams on paid plans can now:

• View their subscription and plan information.
• Make changes to their subscription.
• View payment history and access receipts.
• View changes to their organization account that affected billing.

Monthly vs Annual

With the billing integration, we have support for either monthly or annual subscriptions.  Aside from a 2 month discount for annual plans, there are some differences in behavior:

• Monthly plans are "flex" plans.  As you add or remove people from your organization, your subscription will be updated pro rata to reflect the changes.  You can apply a "seat limit" in the subscription settings to cap your flex allocation from going too high (and costing over your budget).
• Annual plans are "fixed" plans.  Due to the upfront payment, we don't automatically increase seats as people join - you'll need to do this manually from within the billing UI.  Annual plans come with a sizeable discount of 2 months free per seat.

Account Viewers (Read-only Members)

We now have support for Account Viewers.  Viewers are not billed for and you can add as many as you like.  They can join workspaces and access boards, but cannot make any updates to any part of the system.  They are not strictly guests, as they must be registered, but they could be used as a form of guest.  We will be adding proper guest support hopefully in the next update.

When people are added to an account at the seat limit is reached, they will be automatically allocated as Account Viewers.  

You can set existing members to viewers via the people management screen (if you are an admin).

Free Trials

We offer a 30 day free trial of the Team Plan to all accounts.  Trials can be started from within the billing area or via the widget in the top right of the UI when on the Free Plan.  Teams on a trial can see how long is left in their trial (days remaining are displayed in the header), and upgrade at any time. When the trial expires, the space is returned to the Free Plan.

Free Plan

Newly registered accounts (or those choosing not to upgrade) will now be allocated our Free Plan.  This plan allows you full access to the main functions of the tool, but with the following restrictions:

1. Maximum object count.

There is a maximum limit for board objects. These are everything you place on a board: sticky notes, images, text, index cards... You can see your object count at the top of your workspaces and boards. The limit is a total across all users and boards in your space. Once you hit the limit, all your members are prevented from creating any more objects however you can delete old objects to reduce the count. Of course you can upgrade to a paid plan for unlimited objects. 

2. Access Control is disabled.

The organization space is open for anyone with a link to join. You cannot restrict access to the organization on the free plan.  For improved account security, please consider upgrading. Single Sign on is also available 

Upgrade your Plan now!

You can subscribe to the Early Adopter plan right now. The Early Adopter plan is the best value plan we'll offer to Teams, so don't miss out before it ends!

The regular Team and Enterprise Plans will be available when Early Access finishes. 

Monthly and Annual options are available on any plan. If you prefer to pay by invoice, please contact us.

As part of this release, every organization without a paid plan has been placed on a trial of the Early Adopter Plan. After the trial ends the organization space will be downgraded to the Free Plan.

Bug Fixes & Tweaks

Sometimes getting stuck "Joining Pod"

In some cases, connecting clients would receive board updates too early (before they had initialized) and it would cause the loading process to crash.  The result would be a message saying "joining pod" that would never go away.  This issue should now be resolved - if it is continuing to happen to anyone please do let us know!

Dashboard Performance Improvement

Some of you may have noticed degraded performance when accessing workspaces within the last few weeks.  As we have brought more new customers into the Early Access program it's started to highlight performance bottlenecks that were previously hiding out of sight.  

One such bottleneck was in our permissions lookup, which affects every API call.  In some extreme cases, this was causing up to 10 or 15 seconds delay on queries.  Release 42 has an optimized permission lookup routine, which has sped things up a lot.  

For those who are interested, the graph below shows a breakdown of execution time per API call type.  On the left you can see the state of things before the update and on the right how things have improved.  

As you can see, a big improvement!  There is still more to be done though. Performance of the application both in terms of the backend and the in-board editor experience are going to be a big area of focus for us in the coming months.

Team Members removed from Private Boards and Template Library

You can't add or remove people from your Private Boards or Template Library, so we've hidden that panel.  If you think it looks different when you go in there - that is why!

Coming Up

We will be working with our paying customers to test out 'Guest' options - how to include external or occasional collaborators to your boards.

After that we're looking at rolling some usability updates into the boards. We're also going to be undertaking a board performance update, so both small and large boards feel snappy to use!

Welcome to Metro Retro in 2022! Whether you're a Metro Retro pro or you've just joined us, here's some tips and hidden features that will feel like a new release.

There's something useful here for everyone, whether that's bulk-creating stickies from a CSV file or slapping your colleagues. Yep, you read that correctly.

Some of these features are in their early stages and don't have dedicated buttons yet. We'll be adding the most-used features to your boards.

Drop an arrow to say: 'Look here!'

Draw attention by pressing the Tab key to drop an arrow on the board. Or, hold the Tab key while dragging the mouse to highlight an area.

Drop an arrow with the Tab key

Keep time with a stopwatch

You can put stopwatches anywhere on your board - perfect for keeping a team on track! Follow these steps to enable:

1. Open up the Command Palette with Ctrl + Space
2. Search for 'Create: Stopwatch' and select it
3. Set your time and start the clock. Wait for the countdown surprise...!

Create a draggable stopwatch

Import your v1 boards

To use your v1 boards in v2, just select 'Import Legacy Boards' from the dropdown at the top of any workspace.

A new object - Task Cards

Create multiple sticky notes with the ⇧ Shift key

You can create multiple of a sticky note if you hold the ⇧ Shift key when creating. This works for other objects too. Hold Shift before creating the first sticky note and you can add as many as you need of the same color:

Make multiple sticky notes

Sort selected objects into organized lines

If you have a bunch of items selected, press the 1 or 2 key on your keyboard to arrange the items in a neat horizontal or vertical line.

Press the 1 or 2 key to arrange stickies

Pick up multiple stickies at once

You can pick up multiple sticky notes at once using the right mouse button while holding left-click down. This works for other objects too.

Pick up multiple stickies with left and right-click combination

Import CSV data to your board

You can represent any CSV data with Metro Retro's objects. For example, import your backlog to sticky notes and group them automatically by release version and priority. 

Just drag and drop a CSV file on to your board, or copy/paste from the file. Then map the data to sticky notes or other objects and their properties, like content and color.

For more details and instructions, see the Help Guide (How to import data).

Drag a CSV file onto your board and choose your options

Slapping

This is a little Easter egg that we couldn't help but include! To slap your colleagues, just hold the Space bar and whip your mouse through their avatar. You will slap them across the screen!

You can disable this in the Settings if your colleagues get slap-happy.

Jamie shows how to slap

Time Machine

The Time Machine lets you replay all of the actions on your board - it's pretty cool to see the board build up from the beginning!

You can also copy any objects out of the time machine, so you can retrieve deleted items!

Here's the Time Machine in action after a team-drawing retro:

Replaying a drawing session

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.