Your first meeting

Once permissions are granted, Petal asks for your name and a color to identify you to others, then takes you to the main menu — this is where you create or join meetings.

Creating a meeting

The main menu has a single field where you type a meeting name (for example, eng-sync) and a button that reads Create once you’ve typed something. Submitting it creates a room under that name and takes you in.

Rooms you create are saved to a list on your machine so you can return to them later without retyping anything.

The access code

Every room also has a short access code — three groups of lowercase letters (3, 4, and 3 letters), like abc-defg-hjk. This code is what actually lets someone into the room; the room name is just a friendly label. The code deliberately skips the letters i and l so it’s harder to misread.

Anyone with the access code can join the room, whether or not they know its name.

Sharing an invite

From your room list, copy the invite link for a room you’ve created. The link carries the access code (and a friendly label, when the room has one), so no one has to type a code by hand: opening the link launches the Petal app straight into the room, and if Petal isn’t installed, the page offers a download and a join-from-the-browser option instead.

You can also just share the access code itself (for example, over chat or verbally) — anyone who enters it in Petal’s meeting field joins the same room.

Joining a meeting

To join a room someone else created, paste the invite link or type the access code into the same field on the main menu. Once Petal recognizes it as a valid code or invite, the button changes to Join. Submitting takes you into the meeting.

What a teammate sees when they join

Once in the meeting, a teammate sees whatever windows you’ve chosen to share — each one rendered as its own native window on their desktop, not a tile in a shared grid. They can move each shared window independently, just like any other window on their machine. See Sharing your windows for how sharing works from the presenter’s side.