XataWorks Download

User guide

A tour of the window

You have XataWorks open and you want to know what everything on screen is. This names every region and every control, the way the application names them.

One window, four regions: a menu bar across the top, a sidebar of conversations on the left, the chat itself in the middle, and a browser on the right. Everything below names controls the way the application names them, so you can match a word here against a word on your own screen.

The XataWorks window with a conversation in it. The menu bar reads File, Agents, View, Help. The sidebar shows the XataWorks mark, a New chat button with a caret beside it, Activity, search and filter controls, and the chat list. The chat header carries the account name, a No task control, a Default model control, a globe, a skills control and a vertical-ellipsis menu. The transcript holds a question about tickets waiting more than a week, the assistant's run of the site's search operation, and its answer. The browser panel on the right has two tabs open on a fictional helpdesk.
The whole window, with a conversation underway. The regions named below are all visible here.

The menu bar

Four menus, and the first two are always in that order on every platform:

  • File — carries Preferences… and Quit, unless your platform’s own application menu already has them, in which case they live there instead.
  • Agents — your own agents, the built-in App Admin, and New Agent…. See Agents.
  • View — carries Show/Hide Web Browser.
  • Help — carries About XataWorks, which names the framework build the application is running. That is the number to give when you report something.

The sidebar

From the top:

  • The application’s own mark.
  • A control that collapses the sidebar and expands it again.
  • New chat, which starts a conversation sharing this one’s browser tabs, and a caret beside it for the other two options: a new chat group, which gets its own new tabs, or a chat with one of your agents. The difference matters enough that Chats and context is mostly about it.
  • Activity — what has arrived in the chats and threads you follow. It is pinned above the list and is not itself a chat.
  • A search control and a filter control, which narrow the list below without asking the application for anything.
  • The list of chats, with children indented under their parent.

The chat header

The row across the top of the conversation is a status line, not a toolbar: most of it is telling you something rather than waiting to be clicked. Left to right:

The chat header, cropped: a green dot and an account name on the left, then a control reading No task, a control reading Default, a globe button, a graduation-cap button, and a vertical-ellipsis button.
The header’s control cluster. Several of the controls described below appear only when there is something to say, so a quiet chat shows fewer of them than a busy one.
  • The account this chat runs on, with a dot for its state.
  • The chat’s task, reading No task until you choose one. See Work that continues.
  • The model this chat runs on, reading Default until you change it. It is here rather than buried because, once several chats are running, the task and the model are what tell them apart at a glance.
  • A schedule badge, present only while this chat holds a scheduled prompt. It is permanent rather than tucked into a menu for a deliberate reason: a schedule spends money while nobody is watching, so a chat that holds one must never look like a chat that does not.
  • A listener badge, present only while another chat may prompt this one.
  • A suppressed-approvals badge with a Resume button, shown while anything needing approval is being refused rather than asked about.
  • Notifications, shown when something is waiting for you.
  • The browser toggle, which shows and hides the panel on the right and says which of the two the next click will do.
  • Skills — everything this chat can run, one click away. See Skills.
  • A follow control, which decides whether this chat’s messages reach Activity.
  • The ⋮ menu, which carries the occasional things: Account, Tools, System prompt, Log, Schedule a prompt, Listen for requests and Tags for this chat.

The transcript and the message box

The conversation itself sits between the header and the message box. Anything the assistant runs appears in it by name and folds open to show what it was given and what came back — which is the point of naming the specific operation rather than reporting that the assistant “used the browser”.

Below it, in order: a meter showing how full this conversation is against the model’s ceiling, with a Compact button beside it; a paperclip control for attaching things to the conversation; the message box itself; and Send.

The browser panel

A real browser, with tabs, back, forward, reload and an address field. Two controls in its toolbar belong to XataWorks rather than to browsing:

  • a bookmark star, which reads Bookmark this page or Remove bookmark;
  • a page-tools control, hidden until the tab you are looking at offers the assistant at least one operation and then showing the count. Page tools is the article about it.

A permission shield sits beside them on an ordinary website, and is hidden on a page nothing can be granted for — a blank tab, or a page the application serves itself. The browser panel covers what it controls.

About these pictures. Every figure in this guide is a photograph of the running application, captured on Linux. On macOS or Windows the window chrome and the system fonts look different; the controls, and the words on them, are the same.

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