The iPhone app

A study companion for the boards you built on the web — drilling, papers, lectures and orals in your pocket, with the editing left on the desktop.

The MySummaries iPhone app is the same account, the same boards and the same work as the web portal, narrowed to one job: studying away from a desk. Anything you do on the phone shows up on the web, and anything the web generates shows up on the phone.

It is deliberately not the whole product. Building a board — importing a PDF, sifting the scratchpad, writing and rearranging sections — stays on the desktop. The phone is where you use what that produced.

What it does#

The home screen leads with what is due today and a button to start, then where you left off (the same place on every device), then what has been generated recently. Under that are your subjects, and any boards that no subject claims.

From there:

• Boards open as a single column in reading order — your own notes, readable, with images. Not the desktop's multi-column canvas, because a phone is a narrow screen and reading order is what you want on one.
• Cards drill a board's deck, a whole subject's queue, or everything due across every board, with the same four grades and the same schedule as the web. If a board has nothing to drill yet, you can make its cards there from its own notes.
• Papers can be set from a board, sat against the same wall clock as the web, and submitted for marking. Multiple-choice questions are marked on the phone itself; written answers go to the marker.
• Lectures are written from a board, narrated, and played. Audio keeps going when you leave the app or lock the screen, with the usual lock-screen controls, and the text reads along as it is spoken. One caveat: word-accurate timings come from a pass that runs on the web, so a lecture first made on the phone reads along paced by length until you play it once on the desktop.
• Orals list the stations written from a board, let you sit one recorded or live, and keep the marked score sheet for each attempt. New stations are written from the board's own sections, not from a topic name.
• The must not miss core — the short list of thresholds, doses and named criteria a board comes down to — is built and read on the board screen.

Studying, not editing#

The phone makes everything a board produces — cards, papers, lectures, oral stations, the core — and never edits the board itself. Sections are read-only there. So are subjects.

That is a decision, not a missing feature. Editing notes is slow, precise, two-handed work: you are comparing sources, moving text between sections, fixing a table. It is bad on a phone and good on a desktop, and an editor that is bad on a phone tempts you into making a mess you then have to clean up. Meanwhile the things the phone is genuinely better at — five minutes of cards in a queue, a lecture on the walk, an oral answered out loud in a quiet room — need no editing at all.

When you do spot something wrong in the notes while studying, you do not fix it on the phone. You leave a note.

Notes to yourself#

Every study screen carries a note button. Type a note, or hold to record a spoken one, and it lands in that board's scratchpad on the web, marked as having come from your phone, with the context attached: the card you just got wrong, with its question and answer; the exam question and its marking key; the section you were reading; the station you just sat; the paragraph the lecture was on.

Voice notes are transcribed when you import them on the web.

The division is the point. The phone is a capture device — one tap, in the middle of studying, without losing your place. The web is where you sift what you captured and decide what actually changes the notes.

Sharing into a board#

The app appears in the iOS share sheet, so a PDF, a photo of a page, a screenshot, a web page or a voice memo can be sent into a board's scratchpad from whatever app you found it in. It waits there until you sift it on the web, which is where page picking, document conversion and transcription happen.

When something arrives#

Most authoring happens at a desk, so the phone tells you when something the web was working on is ready: cards added to a deck, a paper you can sit, a lecture whose narration has finished, a new oral station.

Tapping one opens where it landed — except a new paper, which opens the board's paper list rather than the paper itself, because opening a timed paper starts its clock and a notification should never do that to you.

These are local notifications, so they arrive while the app is open rather than being pushed to a sleeping phone.

Light and dark#

The app follows whatever your phone is set to. There is no theme switch inside it: one setting for the device is the setting, and a second one in the app would only be a way for the two to disagree.

How to get it#

The app is distributed through TestFlight, Apple's beta channel. It is not on the public App Store yet, so you cannot search for it — you install Apple's free TestFlight app and join the beta from an invitation. If you are using the portal and want the phone app, ask us and we will add your Apple ID to the testers.

It runs on iPhone and on iPad. There is no Android release yet.

Signing in, and what follows you#

Sign in with the same email and password, or the same Google account, you use on the portal. You can also create an account on the phone, and reset a forgotten password from the sign-in screen.

What follows you across both surfaces:

• Your work. Boards, decks and their schedule, papers and their marks, lectures, stations and attempts are all one set of data. A card graded on the phone is due at the right time on the web.
• Where you left off, so picking the phone up carries on from the desktop.
• The language your material is generated in. The board, subject and account language settings you chose on the web apply to whatever the phone generates too. (The app's own menus and buttons are in English.)

A few things stay on the web on purpose: billing and your plan, choosing your examiner, creating and archiving subjects, and everything to do with building a board. The phone's own settings screen is deliberately small — who you are signed in as, the legal links, sign out, and account deletion, which starts on the phone and then gives you seven days to cancel it from Account on the web.