Getting started

Memo is a real-time collaborative tool for organising ideas together, as a board of sticky notes or as a mind map. 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 lets you create your own boards, find them again and decide who can open them and write on them.

Starting a board

From the home page, say what you are making, pick a starting point where there is more than one, then name it and create it. The address it will have appears under the field as you type; that is the link to hand out.

A board of sticky notes then asks what it starts with:

A mind map always starts empty, with one node carrying its name.

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

Models of your own. Any board can serve as the starting point for the next ones. In Share this board, This board as a model offers "a model of my own": it joins the list of starting points, for you alone, and the board wears a My model tag beside its name. An administrator of the site also gets "a model for the whole site", which every visitor sees, signed in or not. The same choice is a column in your own list of boards, on your account page, and in the administration one.

A model is copied when somebody starts from it: its notes, its columns, its boxes, its pictures and its background. Nobody reaches the model itself that way, and it stays what it is, private if that is what it is. What you change on it, the next copy carries.

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 and changed after from the row of papers that opens while you write on it.
• Stickers — the smiling button at the top of the board opens the emoji. Search for one by its English name, or paste any emoji into the field. The pointer then carries the sticker you picked, and every note you click gets it: mark as many as you like, the picker stays open, which is what a round of voting needs. A click on the board's own background, on the smiling button, or Escape, puts the sticker down and closes the picker. An emoji is counted per person: when two people choose the same one, the number beside it says two. Click an emoji already on a note to add your own voice to it, and click it again to take yours back — the other people keep theirs. A note carries twelve different emoji at most, and the nodes of a mind map are marked the same way.
• Shapes — beside the papers, the same row offers a shape: the post-it itself, a rectangle, a rounded box, an oval or a cloud. A post-it keeps the standard size and shrinks the words to fit it, which is what makes a wall of them read as a wall. Every other shape is free: the box grows with the words, up to a width of its own, the way a node does on a mind map.
• Pictures — the Picture button, beside Box, puts down one of the pictures this board carries, as a card with nothing on it but the picture. It is moved, turned and deleted like a note; the corner at the bottom right resizes it, keeping its shape; the pencil, like a double click, offers the board's other pictures, and the one that arrives takes about the room the one leaving had. The same panel sends a picture, as a file or as an address, without a trip through the board's settings, and says how many pictures the board carries out of how many it may. In the settings, a picture says how many cards it sits on: taking it away takes those cards with 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.

A mind map has columns too, the same ones: bands across the map behind the nodes, added, renamed and widened the same way.

Sticky notes or mind map

A board can be shown either way and switched back and forth. At the top of Options, Shown as offers two choices, Sticky notes and Mind map; the board's own is highlighted, and picking the other switches it. Everybody on it sees the page reload in the new view, with a word to say so.

Nothing is lost on the way. Notes become nodes where they stood, and a node with no parent stays on its own: no node is added in the middle. The columns are the same in both views. The links of a mind map are not drawn on a board of notes, but they wait there and come back as they were. A version is kept just before each switch, in Versions.

Only people who can write on the board see the button.

Hanging, linking and folding

In a mind map, a node has one parent. Drag one of a node's handles onto another node to hang it there; if it already hangs somewhere, Memo asks whether to move it or to add a decorative line, which leaves it where it was. Holding Shift as you let go makes a decorative line straight away, and a node may have as many of those as it likes. Each branch has a fold button on its line, just out of the parent: it folds that branch alone, for you, or for everybody with Shift, and stays there to open it again.

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.

Going back

The two arrows at the top, beside the colours, or Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y, take back what you just did: a note moved, a word written, a node taken away with its branch. They go grey when there is nothing left behind them.

They take back your own gestures and never anybody else's. And they do not rewind the board: they play the opposite now. If somebody has touched the same thing since, your going back wins for that one thing. With one exception: they never take away words somebody else wrote. If your text has been written over since, going back skips that one and says so.

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.

With the keyboard

Everything works without a mouse. Tab goes from button to button, then from note to note or node to node. At the top of the page, Skip to the board jumps past the header. Escape closes a panel or a menu and puts you back where you were.

On a board, with a note focused:

The handles between columns and the edges of the board move with the arrow keys. A box is renamed with Enter, moved with the arrow keys and resized with Alt and the arrow keys.

On a mind map, with a node focused:

Screen readers announce what the other people here are doing: a note added, a node deleted, someone arriving or writing.

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.

A mind map follows the same sets of entries, and a card from a wiki is a node like any other there: it hangs on the tree from its four handles. The double tap, the pencil and F2 all open the wiki's editor there rather than a text box.

Adding a set of entries

The Entries button, beside Box and Picture, opens the tray of entries. On a board that follows none yet it opens Add a source straight away; otherwise that button is in the tray's head. Give the address of the wiki. Any address on it will do: its front page, one of its pages, or the address of a set 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 whole form of cards, each of the sets the wiki itself names within one, and its other forms. Pick the one you want.

Adding a set of entries puts nothing on the board: the tray opens on all its cards, the ones already out there ticked and greyed. Click the cards you want, or add them all. When the board follows several sets, the title of the tray is a list to choose the set from. Beside it, Change opens the settings of a set of small cards again, and Remove takes the set off the board, leaving the cards already out there. A board may follow up to eight sets, 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 set again at once, so your edit shows on the card immediately.

Following the wiki

While anybody is on the board, the set 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 set.

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.

Small cards from any form

A wiki holds more than cards: an address book, a list of resources, an agenda. Memo can turn any of its forms into a set of small cards. This needs YesWiki 4.7.0 or later, or a wiki on the Ectoplasme branch.

After reading the wiki, Add a source lists its other forms under Other forms, each with how many entries it holds. Tick one and the Set up the set of entries window opens:

• Name of the set, the form's own name to begin with.
• Picture, one of the form's picture fields, or none.
• Text, the field whose first words go on the card. Memo picks the summary or the description if the form has one.
• Label, one more field the card wears in a small pill at its bottom right: a list of values, shown by their labels, or a short text. None to begin with.
• Filter the entries, built the way the query of a Bazar list is built in YesWiki's components: a condition is a field, an operator and a value, picked from a list when the field has one. Conditions go in groups, and a group says whether all of them must hold (AND) or one is enough (OR).

The window counts the matching entries as you go and shows three of them as they will look. The same form can be added several times with different queries, say one set per region. Change, at the top of the tray, opens the window again. A card already on the board whose entry stops matching greys over with a dashed outline, the same as an entry deleted from the wiki.

A small card lies on its side, 120 by 40 mm: a square picture on the left, the title, and about 140 characters of the text. It has no back. The eye opens the entry as the wiki shows it, in a window over the board. The pencil opens the wiki's editor the same way. When editing an entry needs you to be signed in on the wiki, use Open in the wiki at the top of that window: a page from the wiki shown inside Memo cannot use your session on the wiki, a tab of its own can. Coming back to the board reads the set again.

Memo copies the pictures of small cards, makes them small and serves them itself, through the board. The wiki is not told who looks at which board.

Reading a wiki as an account

Memo reads a wiki as a visitor who is not signed in, so it sees what anybody sees. Under Access to the wiki in the same window, a board can be given an account on the wiki instead. Memo signs in straight away and says which account it reads as. From then on the board reads that wiki as that account, for every set it takes from there.

Everybody who can open the board sees what that account can read, private entries included. Make an account for Memo on the wiki, give it the groups it needs, and use that rather than an administrator. The password is kept encrypted and is never shown again, to anybody. Everyone who can write on the board can replace it or forget it.

A wiki behind a password on the whole site, a herse, takes that name and password under A password on the whole site. Pasting the address as https://name:password@wiki.example/ does the same: Memo keeps the name and password for the board and remembers the address without them.

If the wiki stops accepting the account, the board stops following that wiki rather than going on as a visitor without saying so. The cards stay as they were, and the panel says the account no longer works until it is given one that does.

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 Share this board → 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.

A share link opens the board at its own address, /s/…. It never says what the board is called: not the address bar, not the tab, not the page, and the board does not go into the list of whoever was given it. So it can be pasted into a page without handing over the way to the front door as well.

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

In a page of your own — the same panel hands you an iframe to paste, either editable or read-only. A read-only frame draws the board without a single gesture, which is what you want beside an article, and it carries an address of its own that never says which board it draws. The board keeps one such address and hands back the same one, so a frame pasted last month still works. It can be withdrawn from the list of share links like any other.

Coming in by that address gives reading and nothing else, on an open board as much as on a closed one: the link says read, and the server holds whoever follows it to that. You and an administrator are the exception, so you can still write in your own frame.

What an open board cannot stop is somebody who already knows the board's own address opening it there and writing. The link does not tell them, which is the whole point of it, but if the address is out already, only closing the board takes it back.

Saving and taking it away

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

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

Import a board. It is in Options, on a board or a mind map alike. Give the address of another Memo board, or choose the JSON file it was exported to, then say what to do with it:

• Add it below what is here, the default: its notes, nodes, pictures, boxes and sets of entries come in under new names, below everything already on the board. Its columns go after the ones here, and the links of a mind map follow their nodes.
• Put it in place of what is here: the board holds what the other one held, and nothing else.

Either way, a version of the board as it was is kept first. A board on this same Memo is read directly, so a private one comes in when you may open it, and not otherwise.

Versions — in Options (the cog), the Versions section keeps the board or the map as it is now under a date. Clicking the date downloads that version as JSON. The arrow takes the board back to that version, after saving how it stands now as a new version, so going back can always be undone too. Pictures and the look of the board stay as they are. 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.

Somebody who administers this Memo also gets /admin. What is on that page, and everything else about running an instance, is in the webmaster guide.

A program can drive Memo with no browser at all: the developer guide has the addresses and the keys that open them.

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.