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Download and install

Download the desktop app from the setup page.
Download the DMG or ZIP for your chip:
  • Apple Silicon (M1/M2/M3/M4): qualia-*-macos-apple-silicon.dmg
  • Intel: qualia-*-macos-intel.dmg
Open the DMG and drag Qualia to your Applications folder. On first launch, macOS may ask you to confirm since the app was downloaded from the internet.Alternatively, download the .zip version, unzip, and drag to Applications.
Qualia checks for updates automatically on launch and prompts you when a new version is available.

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Set up a Python kernel

During onboarding, Qualia installs a lightweight managed Jupyter environment so your notebooks can run Python locally. The installer runs the uv tool that ships inside the Qualia app — signed as part of the app itself, so endpoint-security tools that allow Qualia also allow it — and downloads Python packages from the internet, so it can fail on corporate networks that intercept or block outbound traffic. If the installation fails:
  • Skip for now lets you finish onboarding without a local kernel. You can install it later, or connect to remote compute instead.
  • The error shown under Installation failed is the installer’s real output — share it with your IT team to identify what was blocked.
  • On networks that intercept TLS with a corporate certificate, launch Qualia with UV_NATIVE_TLS=1 set (to trust your OS certificate store) or point SSL_CERT_FILE at your corporate root CA bundle. Set HTTPS_PROXY if your network requires an explicit proxy.
  • On machines where security policy blocks downloaded programs from running, install a Python 3.12 or newer approved by your IT team: the installer finds and uses it instead of downloading its own Python.
  • If Python package downloads are blocked entirely, a Jupyter environment already installed on your PATH (with jupyter and ipykernel) is used instead, skipping the managed install.

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Open a workspace

In the desktop app, the welcome screen lets you pick a recent workspace, choose New folder… to create a fresh workspace folder (you pick its name and location), or choose Open folder… to use an existing one. You can also use the workspace selector in the title bar to open a local folder or connect to a remote backend. When you are connected to a remote backend, Open remote folder lets you browse directories on that remote machine and choose the workspace root without restarting Qualia. In Qualia Cloud, the workspace selector lists your cloud workspaces. Select one to switch to its files, projects, agents, terminals, and compute environments, or choose New workspace to create another. Workspaces are isolated, and separate browser tabs can stay connected to different workspaces at the same time.
Remote folder browsing uses the filesystem on the connected backend host, not your local computer.

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Your first session

1

Create a notebook

Click New Notebook in the Files sidebar, or open an existing .ipynb file.
2

Start chatting

Type a message in the chat panel on the right. Try something like:
  • “Load the iris dataset and show me a summary”
  • “Train some CNNs on the MNIST dataset”
3

See results

Qualia writes code cells, runs them, and shows the output — plots, tables, text — directly in the notebook. You can see and edit every cell it creates.
Toggle the chat panel with Cmd+Escape (Mac) or Ctrl+Escape (Windows/Linux).