Sharing your windows

Petal shares individual windows, not your whole screen. You can share more than one window at a time, and each one is a separate share your teammates can move and resize independently on their own desktops.

Start sharing with the hover tab

While you’re in a meeting, move your cursor over any window you want to share. A small pill appears above the window’s title bar (or just inside its top edge, if there’s no room above it). Click Share this window. On Windows (build in development), sharing starts from the in-meeting Share a window picker instead — the floating hover tab is a macOS surface.

The pill only appears while you’re in a meeting — outside a meeting, hovering a window does nothing.

Once a window is shared, Petal draws a border around it on your screen in your identity color, so you can tell at a glance which of your windows are live. The hover pill also switches to Stop sharing. Teammates don’t see this border — on their machines, the shared window itself appears as its own window, with your name and color on its header.

Stop sharing

Hover the shared window again and click Stop sharing in the pill. The colored border disappears immediately, and your teammates’ copies of that window close.

Sharing from the window picker

You can also click Share a window in the meeting controls to open the window picker: a list of your open windows with thumbnail previews, where you can start or stop sharing without hunting for the window on screen. It uses the same share/unshare action as the hover tab, so the two stay in sync.

Sharing priority

The gear icon on the hover pill (it appears when you hover the pill) opens a small menu with four sharing priorities: Automatic (recommended), Responsive: smoother control, Sharp text: preserve detail, and Data saver: 15 fps, slower control. Picking one takes effect immediately for the hovered window if it’s currently shared, and also becomes the default for windows you share afterwards.

Drawing on a shared window

If you want to point something out visually on a window you’re sharing, open the same gear menu and choose Draw on this shared window (the entry is only enabled while the window is actually shared, and reads Stop drawing on this window while drawing is active). Everyone viewing that window sees your strokes live.