Hacking Mmhmm.app to Remove Watermarking and Change the Away Screen
A note; after posting this, Mmhmm reached out to me.
Shoutout to Carolyn from the Mmhmm team for telling me about the Hide Watermark feature under the Rooms drop-down.
Well, at least the articles not a total bust. You can still change your away picture!
Over COVID a lot of us have been trying different video conferencing and streaming tools. A few months back a came across one called “mmhmm.app” on the front page of HackerNews. It was MacOS only and it was in beta.
After playing around with it for a few weeks, I decided it was the most polished, performant, no-bullshit, best silhouette-capable presenting app on the market. It does cost more than $100 per year however, which I’m not sure how sustainable that is considering the beta build I have has the same features and no monthly fee.
As great as the application is — there were a few things that still drove me nuts, even after the eventual 1.0 release of the app and being given a 3-month Pro trial.
- The “Away” screen is branded and the colours don’t go with anything. This is a screen where you can tap “A” on your keyboard (or navigate to “Presenter” and click Away) and a screen saying “Be right back” will pop up. The logo and branding of this screen almost looks out of a kids book, so I didn’t want to use it during work calls.
- Whenever I present, there’s an Mmhmm logo at in the corner. This sucks because if I want to record my presentation, I have to have their company logo on it. This immediately put me off of ever using the application for screencasts or recording, opting instead for OBS.
Understandably both of these are likely done for growth reasons, the developers want to get the application’s name out there — hopefully this article helps that, I think it’s great (although a little pricey for what functionality is usually bundled into conferencing software). But I also want to use the application without their branding creeping into my work.
Luckily, removal of these is relatively easy. Here’s how!
Removing the Watermark
Browse to your Applications directory, and right click on “mmhmm.app”, click “Show Package Contents”.
Now navigate to the Resources folder under Contents, and in here you’ll see two PNG image files. “watermark-lg.png” and “away.png”.
The watermark-lg.png has the Mmhmm company logo, to remove it or replace it with your own you just need to overwrite this PNG file or delete it altogether.
The next time you start the application, the logo will no longer appear. Tada!
Changing the Away Screen
Next we’ll go to that same folder and open up the away.png file, it should look like this.
Now all you have to do is either save this image somewhere else and edit it, or swap in your own image and overwrite it in the same directory. I’d recommend editing this image as the ratio or size of it may be important. For those of you without any image editing software, jspaint.app will be useful for this!
You actually don’t even need to restart Mmhmm.app when making changes to this image, as it reloads it every time you toggle Away. So just tap A twice upon any changes, and your new background will appear!
And the end result..
And that’s it! Enjoy!
If you work for Mmhmm, thanks so much for creating such a great application. Looking forward to seeing what you guys do next with it. The Windows beta looks promising, although given OBS reigns king on that platform — I am interested to see how the usability will compare with Mac.
Cheers,
James.
