Notes

A note is whatever you are learning, written in your own words. Plain Markdown — headings, bold, lists — nothing to learn beyond that.

Or watch it: 7 minutes, narrated, with captions, from a blank note to cards.

• Link ideas by writing [[double brackets]] around a note's title. If that note does not exist yet, the link offers to write it.
• Backlinks appear on every note, so you can see what points at it without maintaining anything.
• Folders and tags file notes; a note can sit in one folder and carry any number of tags.
• Colours are per note, and only there to make a wall of cards scannable.
• Import a PDF, Word file, Markdown or text file straight into the editor, or scan a printed page with your camera. The text lands in the editor for you to check — nothing is saved until you save it.
• Unread markers: a dot means you have never opened that note, or it has changed since you last read it. No dot means you are up to date.
• Search reaches four things at once — titles, the text itself, tags, and folder names. Remembering only that it was filed under "Calculus" is enough to find it.
• Duplicates are pointed out rather than prevented. Recall lists notes that look like each other and offers to merge a pair, keeping the one you choose.
• Previous and next step through whatever list you arrived from, so reading through a folder does not fall out of it at the first tap. The arrow keys do the same thing.

Deleting a note, and getting it back

Nothing you delete goes straight out. A deleted note moves to the trash, where it waits 30 days before Recall removes it for good.

• Straight away, an Undo appears on the screen you land on. One tap and the note is back where it was.
• Later, open Notes → ⋯ → Trash and press Restore beside it. The link only appears while something is in there, so an empty trash is not a button that does nothing.
• Its cards survive either way. They stay in their sets and keep working; they only lose the link back to the note they came from.
• Its links survive too. Notes pointing at it with [[double brackets]] are left alone, and restoring the note reconnects them.
• Emptying the trash yourself is permanent, and the only action here that is. Recall says so before it does it.

One thing worth knowing: a note in the trash still holds on to its pictures, so it keeps counting against your picture allowance until the trash is emptied. If you are short of space, that is the first place to look.

The ⋯ button

Anything that is not an everyday action lives behind ⋯ rather than as a row of unlabelled icons. What is inside depends on what you are looking at.

• On the notes list — select several notes at once, find duplicates, export everything as Markdown, import notes back in, and the trash.
• On a note — edit it, export that one note, make a card from it, and delete it.
• On a folder — make one inside it, rename it, nudge it up or down, move it elsewhere in the tree, or delete it. Deleting a folder never deletes notes: its subfolders go, and everything filed inside becomes unfiled.
• On a card set — open it, add a card, export it as a CSV, and set its colour.

Where a menu can delete something, that sits last and behind a divider, because it is the only item in there that pressing again does not undo.

Writing and formatting

Notes and cards are written in Markdown — plain text with a few marks in it. You never have to learn those marks: the bar above the box writes them for you, and the ? button on that bar lists every one of them without leaving what you are writing. What gets stored is still plain Markdown, so a note exported as .md reads properly outside Recall.

The buttons

Button	What it does	It writes	Shortcut
	Undoes your last change, typing included. It stays greyed out until there is something to undo.	—	—
H1	Turns the line into a big heading.	#	—
H2	A medium heading.	##	—
H3	A small heading.	###	—
B	Bold.	**text**	Ctrl+B
I	Italic.	_text_	Ctrl+I
S	Crossed out.	~~text~~	—
	Asks you for a web address, then links the selected words to it.	[text](url)	Ctrl+K
	Code inside a sentence.	`text`	—
	A whole block of code, kept exactly as you type it.	```	—
	A bulleted list.	-	—
	A numbered list. The numbers are worked out for you.	1.	—
	A tick-box list, for things you mean to do.	- [ ]	—
	A quote, indented with a line down its side.	>	—
	A line across the page, to separate two parts.	---	—
	A small table for you to fill in.	| | |	—
	Adds a picture. Your device shrinks it before it is sent, and you are asked to describe it for anyone who cannot see it.		—
	Links to another of your notes. With nothing selected it types the brackets and offers your titles.	[[Title]]	—

A card's question, answer and explanation carry the same bar, minus the note link — [[double brackets]] resolve between notes, and a card would render them literally.

Three things worth knowing

• Select first. Every formatting button works on whatever you have selected. Nothing selected is fine too — it puts a word in and selects it for you to type over.
• Press again to take it off. Bold on bold text unbolds it, and the bullet button on a bulleted line removes the bullet. Pressing H2 on an H1 line swaps the heading rather than stacking two.
• Enter carries a list on. Press Enter at the end of a list item and the next bullet or number is already there. Press it again on the empty item to stop.

Cards and card sets

A card is one question. Cards live in sets, and a set is just a folder for cards — "Biology", "Midterm", whatever you find useful.

Or watch it: 7 minutes, narrated, with captions, from an empty set to sharing it.

The fastest way to make cards is from a note you have already written. Open the note and choose Make cards: Recall reads the note and proposes questions from its headings, its bold terms, its [[links]] and any Term = meaning lists. Tick the ones worth keeping, fix anything close, and save them in one go. Nothing is written until you press Add.

The seven types

• Flashcard — a question and an answer. You flip it and grade yourself honestly.
• Multiple choice — one right answer among several.
• Multiple answer — several right answers; you have to find all of them.
• Identification — you type the answer. Capitals, accents and punctuation are ignored, and any other spellings on the card's Also accept list count too.
• True / False — exactly what it says.
• Fill in the blank — a sentence with a gap, marked ___ when you write it.
• Matching pairs — terms on one side, meanings on the other, dragged into place.

Every type except the flashcard grades itself. A flashcard cannot — only you know whether you really remembered it — which is why it asks you instead.

Studying

This is the part that does the work. Recall uses spaced repetition: each card comes back at a longer gap every time you get it right, and drops back to a short one when you get it wrong.

Or watch it: 4 minutes, narrated, with captions, through a whole session of every card type.

• Get a new card right and it returns in 1 day, then 6 days, then further apart each time.
• Get one wrong and it comes back in 10 minutes, inside the same session.
• A card you keep failing — 8 times — is flagged so you can rewrite it. A card you cannot remember is usually a card that was badly written.
• Self-grading cards are never timed. The rest give you 25 seconds, which you can switch off in Settings.
• Surprise me deals 5 cards — a session short enough to finish standing at a bus stop.

Every card shows where it stands, read off that schedule rather than stored separately: new, learning while it is still coming back within a week, familiar within a month, and retained beyond that. A card you keep failing reads slipping, whatever interval it is carrying. A set's bar is the same four counts, so you can see at a glance whether it is being learned or already known.

There is deliberately no "mastered". Spaced repetition never finishes a card — it only stops asking for a while — and a screen that said otherwise would be teaching you to stop.

You do not have to plan any of this. Open Study, answer what is due, and stop. The schedule is the whole product.

The Library

Ready-made sets, written for you to take. Copy one and it is yours — edit it, add to it, delete what you do not need. Your copy has its own schedule and is never changed by anything on the shelf afterwards.

Or watch it: 2 minutes, narrated, with captions, from browsing the shelf to studying your copy.

It is also the fastest way to see how Recall feels without writing anything first: take a set, study five cards, and the rest of the app makes sense.

Play

The games are built from your own cards, so they are revision that does not feel like it. Each one asks for something different of a card, so a set can be full of one game and empty of another: only the two spelling games need an answer of a few letters.

Or watch it: 4 minutes, narrated, with captions, one round of every game.

• Speed Quiz — multiple choice against a 25-second clock, 10 questions to a round.
• Hangman — the answer, letter by letter, with 4 wrong guesses to spend. Needs a one-word answer.
• Word Guesser — 5 attempts, with the letters you have placed shown after each. Needs a one-word answer.
• Memory Match — 6 pairs, question to answer, shown briefly before play starts. Any short answer will do, as long as no two cards share one.
• Pair Up — join each term to what it goes with, 3 cards to a set and 3 wrong joins allowed per card. Played on your Matching pairs cards.
• All That Apply — pick every answer that belongs and nothing that does not, 5 cards to a set. Played on your Multiple answer cards, and graded whole: how many apply is part of the question, so it is never shown.
• Survival — keep answering until you run out.

Challenges and duels

A challenge cuts a fixed paper and gives you a link. Anyone can open it — no account needed — and their score joins the board. The questions are frozen when you cut it, so everybody answers the same paper even if you edit the set afterwards.

Or watch it: 4 minutes, narrated, with captions, a challenge and a duel from both sides.

You can cut one from a set of your own, from a single Library set, or from the whole Library at once, drawn at random across every set on the shelf.

A duel is the same thing aimed at one person rather than at whoever has the link: one run each, no second attempt, and the loser gets the rematch. An unanswered duel expires after 7 days, and you can have 5 open at once — it is meant to be a contest, not a queue of obligations.

A duel needs ground neither player owns, so it can only stand on Library material — one set, the whole shelf, or a set you took a copy of. A paper cut from notes only you have read is unwinnable for the other person, and there would be nowhere to send them to prepare. Duels cannot be reshuffled either: re-cutting the questions is two clicks from a contest to choosing your own paper.

Streaks, XP and your learning

Or watch it: 2 minutes, narrated, with captions, reading every part of the screen.

• A day counts towards your streak once you finish a study session. Games do not count, and neither does cramming — the streak is about reviewing what was actually due.
• A day with nothing due cannot break it. Once your cards spread out, some days ask for nothing; those days are not a gap and you do not have to open Recall to protect them. They do not add to the count either — the number is days of reviewing, and a day that asked for none is not one of them.
• Cramming pays once a day per card. It ignores the schedule by design, so going round the same set again is the same day's work rather than more of it.
• XP comes from reviewing, answering correctly, finishing sessions and writing cards and notes. Some sources are capped daily so the number stays worth something.
• Levels follow the XP curve — level 2 at 50 XP, and further apart as you go.
• Your learning shows what has actually happened: how much of your collection is retained, how often you answer correctly, your strongest and weakest sets and tags, and how long a session usually runs.
• It also says when you usually study — and says plainly that this is not the same as when you learn best, which nothing here can measure. A set or tag stays off the list until it has enough reviews behind it to mean anything, and the count sits beside every figure.

Turn on the evening reminder in Settings and Recall notifies you around 7pm when cards are waiting — never more than once a day, never on a day you have already studied, and never when there is nothing to do.

Recall on your phone

Recall installs from your browser — no app store, nothing to download, and the same account. You get a Home Screen icon and a full screen without the address bar.

• Android and desktop: Chrome and Edge offer an Install button, one press.
• iPhone and iPad: in Safari, Share → Add to Home Screen. It has to be Safari; the other browsers there have no such menu item.
• On iPhone the evening reminder needs this. Apple only allows notifications from an app on the Home Screen, so the switch cannot work from an ordinary tab.
• Removing the icon deletes nothing. Your notes, cards and schedule are on the server, and the site keeps working in a normal tab.

Step-by-step, for your device →

Studying with no signal

Or watch it: 2 minutes, narrated, with captions, losing signal mid-review and getting it back.

Recall keeps three things on your phone: the app itself, notes you have opened, and the cards waiting for you.

The app saves itself on your first visit, and notes are kept as you read them — a note you have never opened is not there. The cards are kept at the end of a study session, so in ordinary use they are already on the phone before you need them. To fetch them now, open Offline review under More, or press Save the cards due now in Settings.

After that it works with no signal at all. You see a card, you show the answer, and you say how it went. Offline review is self-graded on purpose: the marking Recall does online forgives spelling, spacing and articles, and a second version of that living in your browser would drift from the first and quietly mark real answers wrong.

Your answers are held on the phone and sent the moment you are back — you do not have to do anything, and sending twice cannot count twice. Come back within 3 days and each answer counts with the time you gave it; later than that and it counts from when it arrives.

• Not kept: pictures on a card, games, challenges, and any note you have not opened.
• Turning it off: Settings → Offline has a switch, in case you would rather Recall used no data keeping cards you will not need.
• If it is not working, open Check what is saved on this phone in Settings. It says which part is missing, and it opens with no connection.

Your account and your data

Or watch it: 2 minutes, narrated, with captions, a tour of Settings from theme to account.

• Everything exports. Notes as Markdown, card sets as CSV. No lock-in, and no need to ask.
• Share links are read-only and unguessable. Revoke one and it stops working immediately.
• Pictures have a 25 MB allowance. Removing one from every note and card frees its space.
• Themes, the answer timer and whether Library sets join your games are all in Settings.
• Recovery: add a second email address or keep backup codes, so a lost password is an inconvenience rather than the end of your notes.