The new video app from Phil Libin that started as a joke made me fall in love with Zoom again. Here's how to use 'mmhmm.'

Let's get started! The app is only available for Apple Macs but a version for Windows is coming soon, Libin says.

This is the app home page. It drops you into a virtual background.

Libin's first tip was to use "good lighting." I turned my chair to face a window, and I noticed the app got a closer crop on my silhouette.

The mask tool lets you choose how to frame yourself on screen. Your options are silhouette, circle ...

... and square. This one's my least favorite.

I noticed the app tracks your position relative to the camera, so if I move to the side, the app still centers me in the square. Pretty cool.

The computer vision is spotty at best. Sometimes, the app completely cut out my hand, which would be important if I was presenting a deck.

But I was impressed that the software knew the difference between my hand and a banana, which it cropped out.

A transparency slider lets you turn invisible if you want to get out of the way of your background.

Poof!

A size slider scales how much screen you take up.

Honey! I shrunk the presenter!

You can change colors to match your mood with the colorize filter.

mmhmm has a massive library of backgrounds, or "rooms."

They're organized by art style and setting and have funny captions like, "Office. We remember."

After messing around for about an hour, I was ready to take the plunge with my first Zoom call. I opened Zoom and selected "mmhmm camera" from the video menu.

It worked! I could see the background I had selected on mmhmm, but in the Zoom app. Time for my call ...

I had a call with Deon Nicholas, who runs a startup called Forethought building artificial intelligence tools for customer support, to talk about new funding.

Ahead of our call, Nicholas sent me the pitch deck that he used to raise a Series B round. I converted the PDF to JPEG images using an online converter, and uploaded the slides to mmhmm. It would have saved me a lot of time if I could have just uploaded the PDF on mmhmm.

Here's a slide from Forethought's pitch deck.

I clicked the slide from the toolbar in the mmhmm app.

And it popped up behind me on Zoom!

Whenever I had a question about the information in the deck, I threw up the relevant slide behind me.

Nicholas joked that he should have used mmhmm to pitch investors, instead of screen-sharing his deck on Zoom.

But it was a pain to switch back and forth from mmhmm to Zoom to Evernote, my note-taking app of choice.

I felt overwhelmed at times trying to click through slides and stay present in the conversation. My dream is to see mmhmm's features layered in the Zoom app.

In the meantime, mmhmm is still an easy-to-use and entertaining app to jazz up your videoconferences. Guaranteed to beat the Zoom doldrums.

Mmhmm