What’s new in Ettex — a summer roundup

A roundup is only useful if it tells you what changed for your own work rather than listing everything that moved. Here is what landed across the suite, grouped by the product it belongs to, with a link to the longer write-up where there is one.

Collaboration arrived in Sheets and Slides

Both now show presence — who else is in the file — and apply edits as they happen rather than on save. Slides adds live cursors and a short-lived marker showing which slide somebody is editing right now, which is the signal that actually prevents two people reworking the same page. One honest caveat applies to both: simultaneous edits to the same cell or element resolve to a single value rather than merging, so splitting the work by area is still worth doing.

Slides got a present mode

Fullscreen delivery with speaker notes only you can see and a timer counting what you have actually used. The detail worth knowing is that present mode lives in the URL, so an accidental reload mid-talk returns you to the presentation rather than dropping you into the editor.

Mail sorts the inbox into five categories

Primary, Promotions, Social, Updates and Forums, assigned automatically on arrival. The part that matters is the override: once you move a sender, that decision wins over the automatic guess from then on instead of being recalculated — so correcting five senders early does most of the work.

Boards enforce a limit rather than suggesting one

Cards move through Backlog, To do, In progress, Review and Done, and a move into a full Review column is refused rather than warned about. The same cards can be regrouped by priority, assignee or label when the column view stops answering the question you have.

An MCP server for the Platform API

Every authenticated endpoint is exposed as a tool over the Model Context Protocol, grouped by product, so an assistant can send a transactional email or read form submissions with a key you scope and can revoke. Public storefront endpoints are deliberately excluded.

Worth saying plainly: the Platform API covers forms, email, sequences, sites and orders — not documents and spreadsheets. Those keep their authoritative copy on your device, which is the trade-off local-first makes on purpose.

Ettex is a suite rather than a set of apps that share a login, so most of these changes are useful in combination: the numbers in a sheet, the narrative in a deck, the request in a form and the decision in a record. If you only read one of the longer posts, make it the one about the product you open first thing in the morning.