Populus Viewer FAQ (WIP)
You can either sign in with an existing matrix account, or create a new account.
To create a new account on the publicly available populus server, got to the login page, click "register", and then enter your name and a password. You'll be prompted to complete a capcha, and then logged in to populus.
To create an account using an SSO provider (like Google, Facebook, Github, or 0Auth), first find a server that supports that SSO provider (matrix.org is a good choice), and then enter that server's name on the login page. A list of SSO provider options should appear, and you can click the one that you want to use.
To sign in, enter your username, password and homeserver on the initial landing page. To log out, navigated to your profile (in the upper right of the resource listing), and click "logout"
recording.mp4
To do this, you'll need to
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Run your own matrix server (probably a Synapse instance).
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fFigure out if your university login supports SAML or OpenId Connect.
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Get your university's IT department to help you configure your Synapse server to authenticate with your university using those services.
If you then enter the address for your matrix server when logging in to Populus, you should be able to select from these options for login, in the same way you would select another SSO provider.
General information on configuring OpenId Connect Providers can be found here. A helpful blog post about configuring Synapse for authentication via SAML can be found here.
First, click the file upload icon
Then select a file to discuss, a name for the discussion, and optionally create a short description. If the name you'd like to use isn't available, you can create an "alias" for your discussion under "advanced settings". The alias will distinguish your discussion from other discussions with the same displayed name.
First, click on the "show more" three dots on the card associated with the discussion:
Then click the "gear" icon from the options that appear. This will open the settings for the room, where you can edit the file details and more generally manage the discussion. This is also where you can set an "avatar" image for the resource that will determine what the resource looks like in listings.
Hover your cursor over the collection name. A "show more" three dots icon will become visible. If you're allowed to manage the discussion, clicking the three dots will reveal icons for all of the actions you're allowed to perform on the collection. The square box icon with a plus means "add a new discussion to this collection".
You can manage membership for a collection by clicking the icon with an image of a person and a plus sign:
This will open a menu that lets you invite, remove, and ban people from your collection.
More fine-grained access control settings can be accessed by clicking the "gear" icon that's to the right of the person-plus icon, and adjusting the settings for the collection.
If you click on the icon for the resource, a filter will be applied to your list of resources to pull that one resource into view. You can then view it as usual using the instructions under Viewing Resources, below.
Click on either the resource title or the resource's image to navigate to the resource.
To create an annotation you need to 1. highlight what you want to annotate and 2. press the annotation button.
The annotation button looks like this:
To create a selection:
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For text: just highlight the text in the usual way
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For audio: long press in the timeline around where you want to annotate. Resize by dragging the ends of the higlighted region
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For video: Just like with audio, but if you select a portion of timeline and then click or tap the video itself, a selection rectangle will occur that you can use to annotate just a specific region of the video during that portion of the timeline.
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For images: long press to create a selection rectangle, the resize or move the rectangle to indicate the region you want to annotate.
Click on the annotation. The annotation and associated discussion will appear in a sidebar on the right side of your screen (or over the whole screen on a smaller mobile device). While viewing an annotation, you can toggle the visibility of the associated discussion by clicking the "discussion" icon in the vertical bar on the right hand side of the screen:
While viewing the annotation, press the "delete" button from the document controls at the bottom of the screen, and confirm that you want to delete the annotation.
Populus will generally not allow you to delete other people's annotations, unless you're the owner of the resource being annotated.
To view a list of annotations, click the annotation listing toggle icon while viewing a resource:
You can filter the listing using the search bar at the bottom. Pro tip: type "@" to filter by annotation creator, and type "~" to use a special filter like "unread" or "questions"
To control access to a particular annotation, first access the settings for that annotation, by clicking the "more options" dots while viewing the annotation:
You can then use the settings modal to control who is allowed to do what in the annotation. In particular, to make the annotation "read only", change the settings so that not everybody is allowed to send messages in the annotation:
Access the settings for the annotation, as above, and then click access to configure who has access. In particular, setting "join rule" to "invite only" will prevent others from joining by clicking the anotation, and setting "visibility" to "hidden" will prevent non-members from seeing the annotation.
