Creating with Flow

Collaboration

You can invite others to work with you on a Flow document in real time by sending them a link. Because Flow documents are stored in your Moleskine Studio account on the cloud, people can see changes to the document as they happen. Your collaborators will need a compatible iOS or iPadOS device. Everyone with the link can make changes that everyone else will see. If you want to collaborate with people who do not have a Flow compatible device, you can broadcast your document over Zoom (view-only for participants). Flow documents currently support five collaborators, but if you need more, contact us.

Requirements

Each participant will need a compatible iOS or iPadOS device, an internet connection and an active Moleskine Studio account (subscriptions still in their trial period are eligible).

Offline Editing

You can still make changes to a shared document offline and it will automatically merge when you next have a connection. Please note this could lead to some interesting results if multiple people have worked on the same area of the document!

Invite people to your Flow document

Tap the collaboration icon on your document (or long press the document from the Collections screen and select Collaboration).

Tap Share Document Link and from here you can directly send the link via the share sheet via iMessage, Airdrop, Mail, Slack or other apps. You can also copy the link directly to your clipboard.

Once the recipient follows the link, they will be prompted to download Flow if it is not already installed and then they will join the document. You will only see them on the list of people once they have successfully accepted the link.

Currently, five collaborators can work together at once per document. If you’d like to have more than five, please send us a message from the Help screen and ask to test our team plan (currently in development), which allows twenty collaborators.

Managing collaborators

If you are the owner of the document, you can remove other people by tapping on the Collaboration menu, swiping left on a name then tapping Remove. If you haven’t stopped sharing the document, people with the document link can still rejoin. To stop sharing the document entirely or create a different share link, see Stop sharing a document.

Remember: collaborators can export images from the document, screenshot and copy content to their clipboard prior to being removed.

If you are the owner of a document, you can turn off sharing by going to the Collaboration menu then tapping Stop Sharing.

This disables the previously created document link, so new people are not able to join the document.

Important: existing collaborators will still be able to access the document, even after you select Stop Sharing. See information about removing collaborators in Managing Collaborators.

Once you have selected Stop Sharing, you can tap Share Document Link again and a new unique link will be generated.

Deleting shared documents

If you are the owner of a shared document and delete it, it will be deleted for everyone. It may appear temporarily for others until their account synchronises with the server.

If you are a participant of a shared document and delete it, it will be removed from your document list but will not be deleted for anyone else.

Finding shared documents

Any documents that have collaboration active will appear in the automatic Shared collection on the Collections screen.

Creating together

Everyone has the ability to modify the creations of anyone else in the document, so be careful not to erase something precious!
Your tools are connected to your own personal account, so everyone will be using their own.

Notifications

You will be notified when someone else updates a shared document, so you can join in or check out their changes later. You can toggle notifications for individual documents on the Collaboration menu. You can turn off notifications for all documents permanently in Preferences > General > Notifications.

Seeing collaborator positions

When another person draws on the document, their initials will appear on the screen. If the area they are working on is not currently shown on your screen, you can tap the initials to jump to that place in the document. You can turn off seeing these position indicators in the Collaboration menu.

You can also tap on a name from the Collaborator menu to jump to the position they most recently edited.

More ways to collaborate in Flow

Flow Slack App

You can install our nifty Flow Slack app and when you share Flow documents on Slack, you will see a document preview that automatically updates and indicators for which collaborators currently have the document open.

Drawing together on FaceTime

You can use FaceTime to talk to others while you create together in Flow. The call window will float above Flow on iPad using Picture in Picture mode.

Broadcasting Flow documents on Zoom

You can broadcast your iPhone or iPad screen directly on a Zoom call so you can share what you are creating with others in realtime. This is ideal if you want to share to lots of people at once in a view-only mode.

To set this up, you will need to enable Screen Recording on your device. See the Zoom support article with more information.

Alternatively you can also broadcast your iOS device via the desktop Zoom client, instructions here.