Have you ever needed to create frames around multiple objects and found using the right-click → Create frame over-and-over to be tedious and a waste of your time? You're not alone!
After a collaboration between a few of us Miro enthusiasts, we bring you: Framer.
| In short: select some objects on the board, fire-up Framer, and now you have frames around each of your selected objects. |
Use cases
- Quickly present (and collaborate on) a PowerPoint on a Miro board in interactive presentation mode – add your PPTX document to the board, extract all pages, select all pages, and Frame them.
- Quickly frame and export a number of objects as a PDF, e.g., annotated PDF pages that you had already extracted.
- Have another use case? Please, share it with the Community here!
There are a few catches...
- This app won't be published in the Miro Marketplace, but you can download it using the direct link at the end of this post.
- Why won't it be published in the Miro Marketplace? Well, to be honest, we didn't even try submitting it, but suspect it would be rejected as it is built on using Miro Web SDK 1.0. This was an unfortunate necessity in order to get the app working as the newer Web SDK 2.0 does not return the bounds (width and height) for document object types. And what does that mean? If you selected a bunch of documents for framing, without knowing the width and height of the document/object, we would have no idea how big it is and therefore could not properly frame it.
- The Web SDK 1.0 will reach end of life at the of 2023, so unless the Miro Developer Platform team updates the version 2.0 to return document object width/height Framer will stop working near the very end of the year.
- Framer will not put a frame around a frame (we heard it could an infinite loop in the space time continuum, leading to the destruction of the matrix).
- And here's the other catch (last one, we promise!). Because the Web SDK 1.0 does not allow for binding/joining an object to a frame (so the object moves with the frame), after you frame all of your objects, you will need to move the selected objects just a bit, e.g., move them up and back down, to make them "stick" to the frames. But we think this is a small price to pay for not having to create every single frame.
Enough mumbo jumbo... let's see Framer in action!
In this example, I
- extract all eleven pages of a .pptx file
- Frame them using Framer
- and them move down just a bit and back up (to attach/bind them to the frames).
A few last notes
Because Framer works its way through all selected objects in a left-to-right, top-to-bottom path, you may want to make sure your objects are aligned accordingly. For example:
However, if your objects are not properly aligned, you may get something like this:
Tip: Use the Auto Layout tool to prep your objects for Framing:
Role the credits...
Install Framer
[Imagine a disclaimer here.]
Feedback is always welcome 😀
