Class notes

The deck is what the lecturer showed. The notes are what they said, and that is what ends up in the exam. That is why notes live inside the document, and Mina reads them when she explains that lecture.

Where you write them

On the document page, below the summary. A document holds as many notes as you need, one per class or one per topic, and each one opens to the side like a page, in the right-hand column.

You write them like in Notion: one line per block, and / lets you choose what each one is. There are headings and subheadings, bulleted or numbered lists, to-dos with their checkbox, quotes and dividers, and Tab indents a line one level deeper. What you paste from Notion or Notes keeps its formatting. It saves itself when you stop typing.

The padlock locks it: a locked note can be read but not edited, so notes you have already cleaned up do not get changed by accident. You delete a note by right-clicking it, and that cannot be undone.

Before you have the slides

Class is now, and the slides show up tonight, or on Friday. That is what the two cards below where you bring in files are for: Take notes, to write them yourself, and Transcribe the class, so Mina listens through the microphone and writes it down on your Mac, without keeping the audio. You also get New class note when you right-click a folder. It is the same note, full screen, and it waits in Opened recently, among your documents, and in its folder.

When the slides arrive, you attach them: from the note, with Attach to a class, you upload the file, drop it on the note or pick one you already had; from a document's page, with Bring in a loose note. The note becomes part of the document with its images, and you never have to say which slide each line belongs to: they are matched on their own, like any other note.

Dictating it or pulling it from a photo

If you downloaded the model that listens, you can dictate a note: what you say lands on the line you are on, turned into text on your Mac.

A photo of your notebook is uploaded from the note, or pasted into it. Either way, Filmina asks what to do with it:

• Extract the text. Vision reads it, the macOS text recognition, which handles handwriting and runs on the Mac, offline. The text sits in a block next to its photo so you can correct it while looking at it, and if you remove the photo the text goes with it.
• Paste the whole image. It stays as it is, one more image in the note.

JPG, PNG, HEIC (what the iPhone takes), WebP and TIFF are accepted. What counts for the explanation is the text: a transcription you have already corrected is worth more than the photo it came from.

Transcribing the class

With Transcribe the class, from the home screen or from an open note, Mina listens through the microphone and turns what is said into text, live, with the same model that listens when you dictate. It does not gather the whole class for the end: every five to twelve seconds, waiting for a pause so a sentence is not cut in half, what it heard is transcribed and shows up. The audio is not kept anywhere; what stays is the text.

The transcript belongs to the same note, but it is kept apart from what you type: your notes on the left and what is being said on the right. Transcribing from a lecture's note switches it to full screen, so both columns fit; with the note beside the document page, the transcript is a line under the title that opens it. You pick the microphone on the same screen, and it stays picked for next time.

What was transcribed counts for explaining just like what you wrote by hand: it is shared out among the slides by the words it has in common with them, and it reaches the explanation, the chat and the summary as long as the note has Use when explaining on.

How they feed into the explanation

Every note on a document has a switch, Use when explaining, on by default. When it is on, the note reaches the explanation, the chat and the summary. When it is off, it goes nowhere: that is for what is yours and not the lecture's, like a to-do list or something you have to hand in.

Notes belong to the document, not to a slide, so each slide picks up the lines that share the lecture's less common words with it. What the note adds, Mina tells you; what only underlines something already on the slide gives that part more weight.

Changing a note changes the explanation of the slides those lines touch, and nothing else: the rest stay as they were. And the summary is not rebuilt from scratch over one note: it reads it and adds whatever it contributes.