Joining from a browser

If someone in your meeting doesn’t have the Petal desktop app installed — or is on Linux (or on Windows until the Windows build ships) — they can join from a browser at meet.petal.live instead. It’s a real participant in the same meeting, not a limited guest mode: real screen sharing, a real camera, and a real microphone, over the same underlying connection the desktop app uses.

Opening an invite link

Petal invite links look like https://meet.petal.live/design-review/abc-defg-hjk — a readable label plus the meeting’s access code. Opening one shows a small Petal page with three choices:

Open Petal — hands off to the desktop app if it’s installed.
Download Petal for macOS — grabs the installer.
Join in browser — continues to the browser client and connects you to the meeting. If you’ve never set a display name here before, it asks for your name first, then joins.

Joining or creating a meeting by hand

At meet.petal.live there’s a single field (“Enter meeting name or Petal invite”) and one button:

Paste a full invite link, a petal://join/... link from the desktop app, or type an access code like abc-defg-hjk — the button reads Join.
Type a plain meeting name instead — the button reads Create and starts a fresh meeting with that name as its label; the access code is generated for you.

Your display name and profile color are set separately: a “Set your profile” card appears on your first visit, and you can reopen it any time from the avatar button. Meetings you’ve joined before show up in a recent list below the field, with favorites and one-click rejoin.

What you can do from the browser

The meeting screen shows a tile grid — one tile per participant, plus a separate tile for each active screen share — with a control bar along the bottom:

Audio — publishes your real microphone. The first click asks for microphone permission and starts publishing; later clicks just mute or unmute.
Video — publishes your real webcam as a normal camera tile, same as the desktop app.
Screensharing — uses your browser’s own screen/window/tab picker to share a real screen, window, or tab.
Draw — toggles drawing mode, so you can sketch on a shared tile; everyone in the meeting sees your strokes in your profile color.
Invite — copies an invite link for the current meeting to your clipboard.
Leave — disconnects and returns to the join screen.

What’s different from the desktop app

The desktop app’s signature feature — a shared window rendering as its own independently movable, borderless native window on everyone else’s screen — only works for participants who are also using the desktop app. If you’re viewing a meeting from a browser, every share (yours or anyone else’s) renders as a tile in the grid, not a floating window. This is a limitation of what a browser can render, not of what gets shared: a browser participant’s screen share is the same real capture as a desktop share, and desktop-app participants watching that same share still see it as a native movable window on their machines.

Access codes are the key, not the label

A meeting’s access code is a short letter code like abc-defg-hjk (three groups of letters; easily-confused letters such as i and l never appear). The code is what actually identifies and authorizes joining the meeting:

The readable label in an invite link (meet.petal.live/design-review/abc-defg-hjk) is cosmetic — it’s there for humans. Only the access code part selects the room, so a label alone won’t get you in.
Typing or pasting the same access code into the desktop app and into meet.petal.live puts you in the same meeting either way.
When you create a meeting, the access code is generated automatically — you only ever need to share the invite link (or the code itself, which is short enough to read out loud).