Design desktop app

The Cortex Design window is the application that edits design canvases. Cortex Design has two surfaces and only two: a CANVASES rail beside a Cortex Chat thread or a Cortex Code session, which creates and lists canvases, and this window, which does the editing. There is no Design page in the browser and no Design entry in the product switcher, so the window is not an optional extra for power users. It is the editor. One thing to settle before anything else: Cortex does not publish a download for this window yet, so this page is not an install guide. What follows describes the window as it is built, so the vocabulary matches when a build reaches you: the sidebar and its four destinations, the gallery it opens on, the screens behind the other rows, light and dark, and the offline states.

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Getting the window

There is no editor in the browser to fall back on in the meantime. What you can still do from the CANVASES rail in a Chat thread or a Code session is ask Cortex for a design, create an empty canvas with New canvas, read each canvas’s counts and status, and use Copy reference to copy the canvas id that the Design window accepts as an address. Generating and editing frames, the version history, the library and export all live in the window. Design needs a Cortex account. Every Design surface refuses a visitor who is not signed in, and the window draws that refusal as a dialog headed Cortex Design is part of your Cortex account.

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The sidebar

The sidebar carries the Cortex Design wordmark, a New design action beside it, and a search field whose placeholder is Search designs, frames, notes with a ⌘K badge. Collapse sidebar narrows it when you want the canvas wider. Below the search field there are four destinations, and nothing else: Under them a RECENT section lists what you opened last. Before you have opened anything it reads Designs you open show up here, most recent first. Your identity and the Settings control sit in the footer. There is no Chat or Code switcher in this window, by design. The Settings dialog says so in one line of its own: Code editor preferences stay in Cortex Code. This window is Design-only. The bindings the window advertises are ⌘N for a new design, ⌘ \ to toggle the sidebar, ⌘K to focus the search field, ⌘E to export, and ↵ to send your message in the editor thread.

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Designs, the screen it opens on

Designs is the landing screen and the gallery of every canvas you own, rather than one thread’s worth. Its header line reports the state of the list, rows are grouped under day headings such as Today and Earlier this week, and there is a Grid or List view, filter chips and a Last edited sort. Design canvases covers the gallery control by control. Before you have made anything the screen reads Your first design starts as a sentence. There are three ways to get past it. Ask Cortex for the design inside a Chat thread or a Code session, use New canvas in the rail beside that thread, or use New design here. Handing a brief to a Cortex Bot is a fourth route the window suggests, and it is not available yet. New design (⌘N) opens a sheet with four fields: NAME, of up to 48 characters, START FROM, a BRIEF that becomes the first message in the design’s thread, and MODEL. Create design (⌘↵) makes it. Deleting a design starts with a dialog that names it, lists what goes with it, and offers Keep it or Delete design. A toast then offers Undo for ten seconds. Let that window pass and the design is hidden, with its versions and images kept, until you restore it or permanently delete it. The Chat thread that started the design is not touched either way.

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Library, Plugins and Bot jobs

Library is a read-only mirror in this window of the components, tokens and pages your account reuses across canvases. Its tabs are Components, Tokens and Pages, each with a count, and Sync pulls the library again after you have added items elsewhere. The tab strip carries a fourth tab listing saved design files, which are files rather than library items and are not one of the three kinds. See Design library. Plugins is the same connector catalogue as the rest of Cortex, with a chip on each card marking which surfaces that connector reaches, Design among them, and the sidebar row counts how many you have connected. When a connector’s authorisation lapses the window raises an authorisation-expired toast with a Reconnect action. See Design connectors. Bot jobs is drawn, and nothing is behind it. A Cortex Bot cannot open, read or change a design canvas today, so the row, the Hand to a Bot sheet and the editor’s Hand to Bot button start nothing. Bot jobs explains what is planned. Inside a canvas you get the editor itself: the board, a thread rail where you ask for changes, a Versions button, and Export. The Export sheet offers PNG, which the window renders on your own machine, and JSON, the canvas document. SVG and PDF are drawn in the same sheet but disabled and marked for the next version. See Generate and edit, Versions and Export a design.

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Light and dark

Settings → General holds a Theme row with Light, Dark and System. The choice is remembered on the machine you set it on rather than carried with your account, so it does not follow you to another computer, and the window opens light until you change it. The System option is offered but does not follow your operating system’s own light or dark setting yet, so pick Light or Dark explicitly. Several other rows in Settings are drawn with a COMING SOON or SOON chip, including the default model, the default thinking level, reasoning summaries, the answer font, chat-history retention and the data export. Design settings goes pane by pane.

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When Cortex cannot be reached

The window is built to stay usable when the Design service cannot be reached, and to say so rather than to look empty. While you are offline, canvases you already have open stay readable from the copy on your machine, and edits queue and sync when the connection comes back. If your sign-in lapses while the window is open you get a dialog headed Your session expired, and work done in the meantime is kept on the machine and syncs when you are back in. A canvas the window cannot fetch gets its own state, headed This canvas isn't available, with Back to Designs. Cortex answers the same way for a canvas that was deleted and one that belongs to another account. Design troubleshooting maps every Design refusal to what to do about it.

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Related

• Cortex Design for what the product is and how its two surfaces divide the work.
• Design canvases for the gallery, the rail, renaming, deleting and the caps.
• Design settings for the panes inside this window.
• Design troubleshooting when a canvas or the window itself refuses.
• Ways to run Cortex for the applications you can run today.