The viewer
On one side, the slide exactly as it is drawn. On the other, the script of what is being said, with the dock below it. And over the page, a frame that moves. On a narrow screen, like a phone's, the script column drops below the slide.
The frame
The frame surrounds the block the voice is talking about and slides to the next one when the idea changes. It is not a highlighter: there is no fill and no veil, because any layer over the paper, however soft, gets in the way exactly where you have to read. It works the other way round too: tap a paragraph in the script and it plays from there.
It is the only thing with colour on the page. It comes in blue, you can switch it to yellow, purple or green, and you can turn it off entirely if it distracts: it is remembered.
The dock and the settings
Below the script sits the dock: previous slide, play or pause, next, where you are, a raised hand to ask Mina about this slide, and the settings, which are five:
- Mode: narrated or silent. Explained below.
- Voice: Mina or Mino, the two for the deck's language.
- Speed: from 0.8× to 1.75×.
- Questions: the end-of-slide question, on or off.
- Indicators: the frame, on or off, and in which colour.
Silent mode
In silent mode Mina does not speak: the script reads whole and sharp, at your own pace, and the paragraph you picked with the arrow keys or a click stands out a little, so you do not lose your place. What belongs to the voice (voice, speed, play, indicators) does not disappear: it is dimmed, so the dock stays the same size in both modes.
The question shows up when you move to the next slide yourself, with the button or the arrow key, because in silence there is no end of audio to trigger it. It shows up once per slide: going back and moving on again does not repeat it, and moving on with the question open skips it.
To listen again, pick Narrated in the settings. While you read, the explanation is written without a voice, so switching to narrated generates the voice for the slide you are on.
Keyboard shortcuts
| Key | What it does |
|---|---|
| Space | Play or pause. |
| Left and right arrows | The previous slide and the next one. |
| Up and down arrows | The previous paragraph and the next, meaning the idea, not the second. With a question on screen, they move through its buttons. |
| 1 to 4 | Pick an option, when a multiple-choice question is on screen. |
| ? | Ask Mina about this slide without leaving the lecture. If you had text selected in the script, it goes along as a quote. More in Ask. |
| Escape | Close whatever is on top: the chat, the settings, or the end-of-slide question, which gets skipped. |
| ⌘K or Ctrl+K | Open search, which looks through all your lectures and notes and works anywhere in the app. |
| ⌘J or Ctrl+J | Open or close the chat with Mina, from any screen. |
On your phone
What the keyboard does, your finger does too. Swipe the slide sideways to go to the previous or next one, tap a paragraph to play it, and your phone's back gesture closes whatever is open on top, just like Escape. Anything that shows up on hover on a computer is always visible on a phone.
On iPhone and iPad you can zoom into the slide with two fingers, up to six times, to get a close look at a small chart; on a computer, pinch on the trackpad. Changing slides brings it back to full view.
Coming back where you left off
Each document opens its own page, and there the Study card shows how many slides you have left and carries on from where you stopped, with the same voice. Closing the viewer takes you back to that page, and when you finish the last slide, Mina congratulates you.
Where you were is kept in your account, not in the browser: you can start a lecture on your computer and carry on on your phone.
When the slide does not say that
Hovering over a paragraph in the script shows a pill with a bug on it, "This is wrong", for the paragraph that talks about something the slide does not contain; on a phone it sits on the paragraph that is playing. A typical case is one that keeps telling the previous slide's topic. It is not a switch: tap it and Filmina looks at the slide again (with its image, your notes and the class material), compares, and tells you what it found in the same pill. If it agrees with you, it rewrites that paragraph without what had been made up and voices it again right there. It also works for a repeated paragraph, one that says again what was already said: if it brings something new, it is rewritten around that, and if it brings nothing, it is removed.
Marking is not being right, which is why there is a review in between. If what you marked was on the slide after all, it tells you and nothing else happens: it is not left marked and it counts for nothing. From what does get confirmed, Filmina learns: that lecture carries on with the correction in place, and once the same kind of mistake shows up across several different documents, the correction starts applying to all of them.