Pins is where you keep things. Not files: things worth returning to, whatever kind of thing they happen to be.
There is one input at the top of the surface, and pressing ⌘B anywhere in the platform puts your cursor in it.
Five kinds
Records
A deal, contact, task, invoice, document, meeting, project or employee from your own database.
This is the kind that makes the surface worth using, and the difference from a bookmark is the whole argument for it.
A bookmark stores a link and whatever title the page had on the day you saved it. A pinned record stores a reference, and everything you see is fetched fresh every time you look: the current title, the current stage, the current value, how far along it is, whether it has been completed.
Pin a deal in January, open it in March, and it shows you March. Nothing has to sync, because there is nothing to sync from. It is the same database being read again.
If the underlying record is deleted, the pin says so plainly rather than quietly showing you a stale copy of something that no longer exists. That is a small behaviour with a large consequence: you can trust what a pin tells you.
Links
Anything external. Paste a URL and it is saved.
Link pins fetch their own preview shortly after saving: the page's real title, its image, its domain. You get a readable card rather than a raw string, without doing anything, and without the fetch blocking the save.
Notes
Your own text. Type something that is not a URL and press Enter for a quick note, or open the composer for a proper one with a title and a body.
The argument for notes living here rather than in a document is proximity: they sit beside the records and links they are about, which is where you will be looking when you need them.
Workspace pages
A place inside NearSync, pinned from wherever you were and opened in place rather than in a new tab.
Useful for the screen you visit eleven times a day and reach through four clicks.
Timers
Time-bound pins that expire on their own, for the things that stop mattering on a known date.
Capturing
The input does three different things depending on what you type, and it works out which without being told.
Type a few characters of a name and it searches your records live, showing what it found with the kind of each one. Pick one and it is pinned.
Paste a URL and it offers to save it as a link. Enter saves it.
Type anything else and it offers to save it as a note. Enter saves it.
The record search is worth building a habit around. Pinning the Meridian deal from here is faster than navigating to Sales HQ and finding it, and the result is considerably more useful than a link would have been.
Personal and team
Every pin is personal or team, and a toggle switches which set you are looking at.
Personal is yours. Nobody else sees it. This is where research in progress belongs, along with half-formed notes and things you are keeping until you decide whether they matter.
Team is shared. Use it for the things a colleague picking up your account should not have to find again from scratch.
Sharing works per pin and is reversible. Sharing an entire collection shares every pin inside it, one at a time, which means anything you deliberately want to keep back needs moving out first. Your private assessment of a client's finance director is the usual candidate.
Three ways to look at them
Cards is the default: preview images, live record status, the most information per pin.
List is dense rows, and it is the only view with multi-select. It is where you go to organise rather than to browse.
Canvas is spatial. Pins become objects you arrange, with position and layering, for when the relationships between things are what you are working out rather than the things themselves. It is a thinking surface, and it is the reason a pinboard exists as an idea rather than as a folder.
What it costs
Nothing. Pinning, resolving live records, fetching previews, collections, sharing, searching: all free, however many you keep and however often you look.
The only thing nearby that spends credits is asking the assistant to find something in the first place. Keeping what it found is free, which is precisely the argument for keeping it rather than searching again next month.
What a record pin actually shows
A record pin is not a title and a link. Depending on what it points at, it carries the live state of the thing.
A deal shows its current stage, its value, and how far through the pipeline it is.
A task shows whether it is done, and strikes through when it is.
An invoice shows its amount and its status.
A meeting shows when it is, or was.
A contact or employee shows who they are now, including where they have changed role.
None of that is stored on the pin. It is read at the moment you look, every time, which is why a collection assembled in January is still accurate in June without anybody maintaining it.
A deleted record says so. The pin reports itself as missing rather than showing you the last thing it knew, which is the behaviour that makes the rest of it trustworthy.
Pins compared with the alternatives
Against browser bookmarks: pins hold live records as well as links, they are searchable alongside your work, and they can be shared as a unit.
Against a document of links: a document does not resolve anything, does not preview anything, and goes stale silently.
Against starring records in each HQ: stars are per module. Pins are one place holding deals, invoices, documents and external material together, which is how you actually think about an account.
Against Bookmarks in the Cockpit: a Cockpit bookmark is an item you kept from your queue. A pin is anything at all. They overlap and the pin is the more general tool.
Where to start
Pin the five records you open most. Deals, a project, your own team's document. That alone justifies the surface in the first week.
Then start keeping links. The habit only pays off once there are enough of them to need organising, which is covered in the next piece.
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