Miro is a lovely application which I find more and more use for almost daily. I wish I had used it when I was more gainfully employed, as I’m confident it would have helped in innumerable ways in the dynamic and creative environment I left for stay at home fatherhood. As it stands, I mostly use it for organizing my creative endeavors and hobbies.

In the case of the latter, I’ve been using Miro since early in the pandemic to play various tabletop roleplaying and miniatures games online with a huge community of players around the world. While there is a bustling and crowded field of dedicated VTTs (Virtual Tabletops) which exploded in popularity as games scrambled to continue online, Miro serves my needs and those of countless others exceptionally without the oft heavy baggage of trying to be all things to all games.

The one area where I needed to supplement Miro usage with additional application(s) was in having reliable RNGs (random number generators) aka dice which could be “rolled” and seen by others at the “table”. While far from a deal breaker the lack of this one piece of the gaming experience was sorely missed.

Some time ago I happened on @Max Harper ‘s wonderful app called “Totally Random” and for the first time was able to create “rollable” “dice” for use by all players in a Miro board. The ‘trick’ was to stack identically sized images of each die face atop one another, lock as a group, select, and use the ‘Shuffle: Stack Order’ option from the Totally Random feature menu. This would quickly bring a single random die face to the top of the stack and presto, a die roll result.

This solution served our needs, but came with the slight incovienience of needing to open a menu and scroll to the specific feature before triggering the desired outcome. While quick enough, it was a few more clicks to make for each roll and another thing which required explanation to persons new to Miro. I dreamed of being able to streamline this process for my specific use case, and with hand in heart reached out to Max with my humble request. To my utter delight, within a few hours I had a perfectly working version of a single button click “Shuffler” which captured exactly the feature I needed from the robust “Totally Random” app.

While Miro is a tremendous platform for collaboration and connection in countless areas, both professional and personal, the cadre of developers and users who share their experiences and expertise so openly with the Miro community at large is, without question, one of it’s greatest assets.

Thanks, again, to Max and to all the other developers out there helping small and power users tune Miro to their needs.