Open the app. The first time, macOS may say it cannot check the developer. Right-click the app, choose Open, and confirm once. After that it opens like any app.
Pair it with the web studio. Settings, then Support and connection. Paste the key you made on studio.tavlai.no under the same tab, and press Connect. Your courses now mirror between the web and this Mac.
Let the workshop install its tools. Settings, then Workshop, then Install everything. Leave the app open. It fetches Quarto for the notes, TeX for the slides and Claude Code for the drafting, into the app's own folder. TeX takes about fifteen minutes. Nothing else on the Mac changes.
Sign in to Claude Code once. Course, then Model, then Sign in to Claude. It opens a browser page from Anthropic. Your subscription pays for the drafting, on your account.
Make a course. Home, New course, a title. Books: drop a PDF in, tick it, then Build the book index in the library. Drag chapters or sections into sessions. Click a session, answer the eight questions, and press the next step it offers.
Every step after that is one button, in order: draft the plan, read it, approve it, draft the slides, and so on. The button on each session always says what comes next.
Updates
The app checks the web studio once a day. When a new version is ready it says so at the top. Quit and reopen, and you have it. Nothing to download by hand.
For the advanced user
The switch. "Advanced" at the top right. Simple, the default, shows what comes next and little else. Advanced shows the model names, the commands as they ran, file paths and hashes, every part's state, and the Student data and Activity tabs. The app remembers the choice on this Mac.
Nothing is hidden. Settings, Activity shows every command the app ran, with its output. The Workshop tab says where each program is.
The course folder is a folder. Workshop, "open it in Finder". Every plan, deck, script and quiz is a plain file you can edit in any editor. The app notices, and an edited approved file goes back to draft.
Any model. Course, Model: Claude Code, Codex, Gemini, or any OpenAI-compatible endpoint, including a local one. The brief is the same text whichever runs it.
Run the pipeline yourself. The sealed app runs any pipeline script the way python3 would:
The scripts live inside the app under Contents/Resources/studio. Or clone the repository and run them with your own Python: the app and the repository are the same code.
Where things are
What
Where
your courses
~/Library/Application Support/CourseStudio/courses on this Mac, and your workspace on the web studio
the workshop's programs
~/Library/Application Support/TavlAI Studio/tools, and TeX under ~/Library/TinyTeX