Scratchpad

The inbox each board keeps for material you have not sifted yet — screenshots, documents, pasted text and notes from your phone.

The scratchpad is where material waits. You capture a chapter, a slide, a screenshot or a thought now; you decide where it belongs on the board later. Nothing files itself, and nothing you drop in changes the board until you say so.

It belongs to the board you opened it on, and it opens from Scratchpad on the bar while the board is in Edit mode.

What lands in it#

• Anything you drop. Drag a screenshot, a PDF or a Word document anywhere onto the board — twenty files at a time — and it joins the stack.
• Anything you paste. Paste text on the board and it lands as an item. + Text does the same for something you would rather type out.
• PDFs and Word documents. Both are read in your browser, and neither file is uploaded. A PDF shows you its pages so you can pick which ones to import, twenty at a time; a page with no text layer of its own is read as an image instead. A Word document comes in with its pictures.
• Recordings. A lecture recording or a voice memo, audio or video, is transcribed and the transcript joins the stack.
• Another board. + Board folds a board's notes into this one — one of yours, or one shared with you. What this board already covers is skipped, so pulling a shared board's later updates is the same action again.
• Papers. A PubMed search on this topic, with the results you tick becoming items.

Sifting#

The stack has two tabs: To sift, and Processed for what you have already dealt with. An item has two ways onto the board.

Review is the one you will use. The model reads the item against every section already on the board and proposes where it goes: this paragraph added here, this line replaced there, this much as a new section. You get it as a diff with a tick beside every line, and only what you keep is applied. Nothing else on the board is touched.

Add as-is skips the model and puts the item on the board word for word, as its own card. It costs nothing and is the right answer for a passage you want verbatim.

A screenshot has two more options first: Lift text reads the words off it into an item you can edit, and where the picture holds a diagram worth keeping, it offers to crop it out and keep it beside the text.

Anything you decide against can be marked done without applying it, or deleted. A board's stack holds a hundred items waiting; sift or clear some before it fills.

From your phone#

The iOS app writes into the same stack. It can share a document or a page into a board from anywhere in iOS, and it can take a note to self — typed or spoken — while you are drilling cards, sitting a paper, listening to a lecture or reading the board.

A note arrives tagged with where you wrote it, so the web has the card, the marking key or the section you were looking at, not just the words. It offers what to do with it — correct that card, write a new one, rewrite the section, add it to what you should be examined on next, set a paper on it, write a station — and you can always ignore all of that and fold it in like any other item.