Using Memo

Memo is a wall of sticky notes that several people write on at once. Open a board, write on it, move things around; everyone looking at it sees the change as you make it.

Anyone can open a board somebody sent them and write on it. An account is what gives you a list of your own boards and lets you close one to everybody else.

Starting a board

From the home page, give the board a name and choose what it starts with. The address it will have appears under the field as you type — that is the link to hand out.

The last two ask for an address. For a Memo board, that is the address its JSON export sits at. For a wiki, any address on it will do — see Cards from a wiki below.

Nothing about the starting point is permanent. Columns can be added, renamed and removed on any board.

Notes

The coloured buttons at the top of the board add a note. Click a note to write on it, click away to save. Drag it anywhere.

• Colours — five of them, chosen when the note is made.
• Dots and stars — drag one from the panel onto a note, to vote, to mark, to sort. Drag the eraser over a note to clear it.
• Deleting — the cross in the top right corner of the note.

While somebody is writing on a note, nobody else can: the note is held for the length of the edit and released when they are done, so two people cannot overwrite each other mid-sentence. The note says who is holding it, with their face beside the name when they have one.

Notes are life size — what you see is what comes out of the printer.

Columns

Add a column from the button beside an existing one, or from the board menu on an empty board. Click a column's name to rename it. Drag the line between two columns to change how wide they are.

Columns are a layer under the notes, not a container: a note dropped on a column belongs to it, and removing a column leaves its notes where they are.

How the board looks

From Options → Appearance, a board gets a background. A dropdown chooses between the sixteen pictures the server comes with and the ones this board carries; the button beside it is for no picture at all. Two sliders below set how much of the picture shows through and how much of the board does, and a colour picker sets what is behind when there is no picture.

Your own pictures live under the second entry of that dropdown, along with the two ways of adding one: send a file from your machine, or give the URL of a picture and let the server read it. Either way it comes back as a WebP no wider than 1920 pixels, and the original is not kept — so a four megabyte photograph becomes a couple of hundred kilobytes without anybody thinking about it. PNG, JPEG, GIF and WebP all get in; HEIC, which is what an iPhone takes, needs a codec the server may not have.

A picture taken on a phone arrives the right way up, whichever way the phone was held. And what the phone wrote in the margins — where the picture was taken, which phone took it — does not survive: a holiday photograph on a shared board does not say where the holiday was.

A board holds sixteen pictures — the number an instance may change — and they belong to it: delete the board and they go with it. Sending one asks for an account, so there is always somebody to ask about a picture; opening a board and writing on it still asks for nothing. The cross on a picture takes it away for everybody.

Pasting an address is reading, not linking. The server fetches the picture once and keeps it, so the people looking at your board never fetch anything from the machine the address pointed at — and the board still works after that machine has gone.

Moving about

The board is looked at through a window, the way a map is.

Either edge of the board can be brought to its side of the window and no further, so the board cannot be lost off the screen.

Where you are looking is yours alone. None of it is sent to anybody else, and none of it moves a note.

Cards from a wiki

Besides notes, a board can hold wikicards: two-sided cards from a YesWiki, drawn to the design of the qrcards tool. A front with a picture, a hook and its pictograms; a back with the prose, the link and a QR code for that link. They are dragged, stacked and deleted exactly like notes.

Adding a deck

From Options → Wikicard sets, or when starting a board, give the address of the wiki. Any address on it will do — its front page, one of its pages, or the address of a deck if you have it:

https://metacartes.net/wikicartes/
https://metacartes.net/wikicartes/?BazaR
https://metacartes.net/wikicartes/?PagePrincipale/edit&from=elsewhere

Memo reads the wiki and shows what it found. A wiki holds two kinds of deck: a whole form of cards, and each of the sets the wiki itself names within one. Where there is more than one, you pick.

Adding a deck puts nothing on the board. It puts a button beside the note colours, and that button opens a tray of every card in the deck — the ones already out there ticked and greyed. Click the cards you want, or add them all. A board may follow up to eight decks, so a workshop can deal from several at once.

The four corners of a card

Each control appears when the pointer is over the card, or always on a touch screen.

• Top left — the circular arrows turn the card over for you: nothing is sent and nothing is stored, like picking a card up off the table. The people icon turns it over for the room, which everybody sees and which survives a reload.
• Top right — delete. On its own, away from the rest, because it is the one that cannot be undone.
• Bottom left — how far round it is turned. Hold it and move up or down to turn the card freely; tap it to step by fifteen degrees, which is how a card gets back to straight.
• Bottom right — the wiki's own editor, in a window over the board. Closing it reads the deck again at once, so your edit shows on the card immediately.

Following the wiki

While anybody is on the board, the deck is read again about once a minute. Edit an entry in the wiki and the card says the new thing shortly after, wherever somebody has dragged it to — a card on the board is not a copy, it is a reference, so a refresh never disturbs where a card sits or which way up it is.

If an entry is deleted from the wiki, its card is not removed: nothing should disappear from under somebody mid-workshop. It stays where it is and is greyed with a dashed outline to say it no longer matches the deck.

A card is the printed card, at the size it prints: 75 by 125 mm, on any screen wide enough — which is what makes what is on screen a preview of what comes out of the printer.

Sharing a board

The share button in the header copies the board's address. Anyone with it can open the board and write on it, unless the board has been closed.

Closing a board — from Options → Board access, a signed-in person can make a board private. It is then open only to the accounts listed there and to anyone holding a share link. Two kinds of link can be made: one that only reads, and one that writes. A link can be withdrawn at any time.

Whoever locks an open board owns it. Until somebody does, any signed-in person can.

Saving and taking it away

From Options → Export, a board can be taken away as:

• JSON — everything, and the one that can be read back in (Import a board, or From a Memo address when starting one).
• JPEG — a picture of the board as it looks.
• Plain text and CSV — the notes as words, by column.

Versions — from the same panel, saving a version keeps the board as it is now under a date. Saved versions survive an import, so reading another board in over this one never destroys what was here.

Accounts

Opening a board and writing on it never needs an account. Making a new one does, unless the person running this Memo has said otherwise.

An account gives you:

• My boards on the home page — the ones you made or opened, with the ones you starred first. Each says what it is to you: yours, shared with you, or one you have been on. Without an account that list still exists, but it lives in this browser alone.

• My profile, from the menu behind your initials: the same list with a little more about each board, a picture of yourself if you want one, and — where this Memo is the one keeping your password — somewhere to change it. You are asked for the current one, so a session left open on a shared machine is not enough to lock you out of your own account.

  The picture is shown beside your name wherever your name is: in the header, on that page, and on the boards you are on — in the list of people present and on any note you are holding — so a roomful of people tell each other apart at a glance. Signed in, you go by your account name there and the field for typing another one is gone; it is for the people who have not signed in.

• The ability to close a board to everybody else, and to be let into one somebody else closed.

An admin also gets /admin: every board and every account, with a way to tick several boards and delete them together, and a Backups tab showing the copies of the database on the server, with a button to take one there and then, and a way to download or delete each. A snapshot holds everything the instance holds — private boards and password hashes included — so it is treated the way the server itself is.

Languages

The interface comes in English, French, Spanish and Russian, switchable from the header of every page, including this one.

Only the interface is translated. Note text, column names and board names are whatever the people using them typed, and are never touched.