Guide

IdeaBoard organizes a story as Story → Board → Notes. Create an account, then create your first story from the dashboard — it opens onto an infinite canvas where all your work happens.

• Sign up with email and password, or continue with Google.
• New story from the dashboard gives you a fresh board.
• Every board autosaves as you work — there is no save button to remember.

The board is an infinite canvas you can move around freely.

• Pan: drag empty space, or scroll.
• Zoom: pinch, or Ctrl + scroll. Controls sit in the corner.
• Fit to screen recenters everything you've made.
• Snap to grid (magnet icon, or Shift+G) aligns everything you move to a 20px grid. It's separate from showing the grid, so you can snap without the dots or see the dots without snapping.
• The toolbar adds notes, drawings, and connections, and opens the components panel.

A story can hold as many boards as you need — useful for splitting a big project into separate canvases like “Act 1”, “Side Quests”, and “Characters”. Boards appear as tabs just under the story header.

• Switch boards by clicking a tab. The open board is remembered in the page URL, so you can bookmark or share a link straight to it.
• Create a board with the + button at the end of the tab strip.
• Rename by double-clicking a tab, or from its menu. Duplicate copies the board with all its notes and connections intact.
• Delete removes the board and everything on it. A story always keeps at least one board, so the last one can't be deleted.

• The grid icon at the end of the tab strip opens an overview of every board: search them by name, see how many notes each holds, and group them into folders. Deleting a folder keeps its boards — they just become unfiled.

Notes are the core building block. Add one from the toolbar or by double-tapping empty canvas, then double-click a note to edit it.

• Markdown: headings, bold, italic, lists, task lists, links, and tables all render as you'd expect.
• Move & resize: drag to reposition, drag a corner to resize.
• Color: pick from the note palette to group things visually.
• Lock a note to prevent accidental moves; delete from its menu.
• Images: add an image block inside a note (validated for type and size).

Connections turn a pile of notes into a map. Drag from the handle on one note to another to create a directional arrow showing which beat leads where.

• Arrows are directional — perfect for branching choices and story flow.
• Recolor or delete a connection from its controls.
• Deleting a note also removes the connections attached to it.

When a sketch says it faster than words, add a drawing from the toolbar and draw freehand. A drawing behaves like a note: move it, resize it, and connect it to other notes — useful for maps, timelines, or the shape of a space.

A container is a named region of the canvas that groups the notes inside it — handy for marking out an act, a chapter, or a cluster of related scenes. Add one from the toolbar or press C.

• If you select some notes first, the new container is drawn around them automatically. Otherwise it appears at the centre of your view at a default size.
• Membership is automatic: a note belongs to whichever container its centre sits inside. Drag a note in or out and it joins or leaves — there's no “add to container” step. The header shows a live note count.
• Drag the header to move a container — everything inside moves with it. Drag the edges to resize. The body is click-through, so notes on top stay usable.
• Rename by double-clicking the name. Pick a colour, or lock a container to prevent accidental moves, from its menu.
• Deleting offers two choices: remove just the container and leave the notes on the canvas, or delete the container along with everything inside it.

• Collapse a container with the chevron in its header to shrink it to a single strip. The notes inside stay on the canvas; they're just no longer framed.
• The Containers button in the header opens a panel listing every container on the board — search them, edit names and descriptions inline, expand one to see the notes inside, and click through to jump to any of them.

Inside a note you can link to another board, or to a container on it, using #. Click a link to jump straight there.

• #Prologue — go to the board named Prologue.
• #Prologue/Vault — go to the container Vault on that board.
• Names with spaces need brackets: #(Act One) or #(Act One/The Vault). Without them the link would have no way to tell where the name ends and your sentence continues.
• A link to something that doesn't exist shows an amber warning, the same as an invalid component reference — so a renamed board never leaves a silently dead link.

Components are the variables your story turns on — the things that change as a reader makes choices. Open the Components panel from the toolbar to manage them.

• Number — a count or score, e.g. fuel.
• String — a piece of text, e.g. the hero's name.
• Boolean — a true/false flag, e.g. hasKey.
• List — a set of choices, e.g. weather is one of sunny, rainy, snowy. Click a choice on the component card to mark it as the selected value (click again to clear it).

Once a list has a selected value, conditions compare against that choice — so weather == "rainy" works the way you'd expect, while weather includes "snowy" still asks whether it's one of the available options.

For a list, open the component and use the choices editor to add, rename, reorder, or remove options. Each component also shows its current value, a “used in N notes” count, and a Reset to default action. Renaming a component updates every note that references it.

Inside a note, type @ to open autocomplete and pick a component. IdeaBoard inserts a reference token like {{fuel}} that stays linked to the component.

• Valid references render as a chip; click one to jump to the components panel.
• If a referenced component is renamed, the token updates automatically. If it's deleted, the reference is flagged so you can fix it.
• The components panel shows exactly which notes use each component.
• Show values (eye icon in the toolbar, or P) swaps every reference for its current value, so you can proofread a note as a reader would see it. For a list, that's its selected choice.

A conditional note routes to different notes depending on your components' current values — useful for branches like “only show this scene if the player has the key.” Add one from the toolbar (or press Shift+N).

• Open Manage branches to define one or more branches. Each branch has a label, a target note, and one or more conditions (e.g. hasKey == true) — all conditions in a branch must be true for it to match.
• Branches are checked in order; the first one that matches wins. Add an else / default branch to catch everything else.
• The note shows every branch live: the currently active branch is highlighted, and its connection on the canvas is drawn thicker and solid — every other branch's connection is dashed and faded. Change a component's value in the panel and watch the active path update.
• If a branch's condition references a component that's been deleted, a warning icon appears on that branch.

A technical note is the write side of a conditional note: it changes a component's value when a reader reaches it (e.g. adding to gold, or toggling hasKey to true). Add one from the toolbar or press Alt+N (Option+N on Mac).

• Open Manage updates to add one or more changes. Each update picks a component and an operation: Set, Add, Subtract, Multiply, Toggle, or Append — available operations depend on the component's type.
• The note previews each change live, showing the current value and what it would become (e.g. 15 → 25).
• Click Apply to actually run the updates on the components now — useful for walking through a path and testing how your variables evolve. This edits the real component values, the same as editing them in the Components panel.

You can export any story to a single file and import it back later — useful for backups, moving work between accounts, or duplicating a story as a starting point.

• Export: open a story's menu on the dashboard and choose Export, then pick a format. Archive (.ibs) is a compressed full backup with an integrity checksum; Readable (.json) is a plain, diffable file. Both contain everything: boards, notes, connections, containers, and components.
• Back up everything: the Back up all button downloads every story as one ZIP of .ibs archives, with an index of what's inside.
• Import: use the Import button on the dashboard. It accepts any of the three formats — .ibs, .json, or a bulk .zip — and shows you what the file contains before anything is created. Importing a bulk backup restores every story in it.
• Importing always creates a new story with fresh IDs — nothing you already have is overwritten or merged into. You can rename the story during import, and you'll be warned if the title matches one you already have.
• Conditional branches, technical updates, and container groupings all survive the round trip, as do component references in your notes.

Every board keeps a session history of your recent actions — creating, moving, resizing, editing, recoloring notes, and creating connections.

• Undo: Ctrl + Z
• Redo: Ctrl + Shift + Z or Ctrl + Y

From Settings you can manage your profile and preferences.

• Profile: display name and bio.
• Avatar: pick a generated style or upload your own image.
• Theme: switch between light and dark from the toggle in the header.
• Privacy: boards are private to your account by default. You can delete your account and its data at any time.