A first look

Experiware opens on a sample design rather than an empty window, so there is something to fly around and click before you have drawn anything. Nothing about it is special: it is an ordinary document, and File → New clears it away.

The sample design

The sample is a droplet-microfluidics workflow, read left to right. A tee splits one sheath supply into two, which meet the dispersed phase at a flow-focusing junction; the droplet stream runs through a serpentine mixer and pours into a collection chamber. A second chamber sits on its own layer, connected to nothing — it is there so the design has two layers to look at.

Three of its connection points are open to the outside: the two inlets and the chamber’s outlet. The viewport draws each as a burst, which is how a port reads at a glance.

The title bar says Untitled — Experiware. The sample has never been on disk, so Save asks where to put it, exactly as it would for a new document.

The window

Five menus run across the top — File, Design, Edit, View and Help. Help → User Guide (F1) opens the guide you are reading.

The left panel stacks the quick settings strip over three zones: the Components and Libraries browser, the Layers list, and the Problems report. The viewport fills the middle, with the toolbar above it and the status bar below. The inspector is the right-hand panel, and it is where you edit.

Nothing in that frame opens or closes as you work. Every boundary is a drag handle, and where you drag it to is remembered. Window & panels is the full account.

The two views

Experiware opens in the 3D orbit view, where the slabs are drawn with their depth — a channel is a trench, and a chamber has a floor.

Right-drag orbits, scroll zooms on the cursor, and middle-drag pans. The camera never sits on the left button, so it stays available whatever tool you pick. Press F to frame the whole design again after roaming.

Press Tab for the 2D top-down view. That is the authoring view: the grid is square to it and every shape reads at true position and size. Each view keeps its own camera, so Tab twice returns you to where you were.

The selection

Left-click a channel. It lights in the viewport, the inspector’s lower zone fills with its detail, and the matching row scrolls into view in the inspector’s Body tab. The panel and the canvas are two views of one selection, so clicking either is the same act.

Click inside the collection chamber and you select the compartment you pointed at rather than the whole region — a click takes you into a shape. Esc steps back out one tier at a time, and a click on empty space clears the selection.

Hovering names what is under the cursor on a small chip beside it, so you can read the design without changing anything.

The layers

The Layers zone lists the sample’s two layers. Layer 0 is the active one: it is drawn in full color while the other is muted, and it is where a newly drawn shape would land. Click Layer 1 to move the emphasis, which changes nothing in the design.

Drag Explode and the slabs separate along the stack axis. Slabs are drawn opaque, so that gap is how you see a buried layer. The checkbox at the end of a row hides that layer outright.

The report

The Problems zone is the live design-rule check, recomputed after every edit. The sample is clean, so it reads no problems, over a dim line naming the rules the process asks for that are not measured yet. Nothing here blocks you — the report states what it found and leaves the work to you.

Where to go next

• Tutorial: your first chip — build a small design from an empty document.
• Interface reference — every surface of the app, one page each.
• Concepts — the model underneath: components, channels, regions, layers and rules.
• Keyboard & mouse reference — every key and button in one table.