Demo Mode

In the installed app or a local development build, open the demo to explore a sample lab as a researcher named alex. The demo uses temporary data instead of your notebook folder. The public website does not open this interactive workspace. You can watch recorded app demos there instead.

What you'll see

The Home page opens with four projects, all prefixed DEMO: so it's obvious nothing here is real research. Each project has experiments on the Gantt, methods in the library, a couple of PCR protocols, a funded purchase list, and a few results pages with lab notes. Other seeded users have shared records across alex's projects, so the comment threads, the lab announcements, and the cross-user views all have real content the moment you arrive.

Bare /demo stays at /demo in the URL bar and renders the Home page. Click any nav link (Gantt, Methods, Calendar) and the URL switches to the regular app path (/gantt, /methods). Demo state follows you through those navigations via a sticky session flag, so the watermarked data and the demo affordances persist across every route. Deep links like /demo/methods also work. The app installs the fixture first, then redirects to /methods so the shareable link lands the visitor on the right view.

Who's in the demo lab

Three seeded users are available from the user-picker. It helps to know who is who, since exploring the lab-head views and the shared records means signing in as the right researcher.

• alex (member). The default sign-in. Owns all four DEMO: projects and is the user you start as on /demo.
• morgan (member). Shares one project with alex and drops comments into alex's threads, so any view that filters by shared records shows real cross-user activity.
• Dr. Mira Castellanos (account_type lab_head). The PI of the demo lab. Pick her to explore the lab-head views, the lab inbox, the PI audit log, the announcements, and the flag-for-review notifications. She owns the orange (#f97316) user color in the comment threads.

There's also a fourth person in the data, Dr. Sam Whitley (member, archived). He's not in the user-picker because mira archived him on 2026-03-15, and archived users drop out of the sign-in roster and the assignment pickers. He's there to show what archiving does. His historical comments are still visible across the lab, so you can see that an archived member's past work sticks around even after they're gone.

Edits are temporary

Everything you do in /demo (dragging a Gantt bar, editing a lab note, adding a task, dropping in an image) stays in this browser tab. There's no disk write, no upload, no account. Refresh the tab and the demo resets to its seed state. Good for kicking the tires, not for real research.

Dates always feel current

Every demo experiment, goal, and event gets its start and end date rebased on the fly. Every date shifts by exactly the number of days since your last visit, so the demo's “now” lines up with your real now. Visit the demo this week and upcoming experiments stay upcoming, the Gantt scrolls to the current week, and the calendar shows events around now.

Method history, PCR protocol creation dates, and lab note timestamps stay put, because they read as history rather than schedule. Visit the demo one day, come back a month later, and the timeline slides forward without compounding drift, since each visit shifts only the days since the last one.

Floating affordances in the demo

Two small pill buttons live in the bottom-right corner and follow you across every route while the demo's sticky session flag is set, including wiki pages you may bounce to. Both use the same muted neutral pill style (surface-raised background, border, foreground-muted text) so they read as quiet controls rather than dominating the screen.

• View as lab head / View as member. The demo signs you in as alex (a lab member) by default. The View as lab head pill switches the fixture identity to Mira, the demo's PI, so you can explore the Lab Overview dashboard and other PI-only surfaces. Clicking it again (labeled View as member) switches back to alex. The identity switch is a hard navigation through /demo so the fixture re-seeds as the target user.
• Leave demo. An always-visible escape hatch. Clicking it opens the Leave the demo dialog described below. It never disappears so you always have a one-click exit.

Feature wiki pages with a demo-able view embed an amber inline call-out (the TryInDemo component) that drops you into /demo/<route> for that view. Each call-site picks its own label, so you'll see variants like Try the Gantt view, Try methods in the demo, Try the Workbench, and Open the demo and try Lab Notes depending on which feature page you're reading. The click installs the fixture and lands you on the live editor with the demo's seeded protocols already loaded.

Leaving the demo

The muted Leave demo pill in the bottom-right follows you across every route while the demo flag is set. It's undismissable, so you never lose the exit. Clicking it opens a dialog titled Leave the demo? with two choices.

• The Leave demo button at the top resets all demo state in this tab and drops you on the connect screen, ready to pick a real folder (or start a new one). Demo edits are not saved to disk anywhere, so they go away with the reload. If you opened /demo from a tab that was already connected to a real folder, the original folder is restored automatically.
• The smaller Keep exploring the demo link at the bottom just closes the dialog if you clicked Leave demo by mistake.

Three ways to try the app

• /demo (this page). Fastest. Open the URL, click around, no setup. Edits are temporary and vanish on reload. Best for a first look or for sharing a link with a labmate.
• The “download as a starter folder” link. On the welcome page there is a link to download demo-lab.zip with the same seeded yeast lab. Unzip it, point ResearchOS at the unzipped folder, and your edits persist on disk for as long as you keep the folder around.
• Connect a real folder. For actual research work. See Connecting Your Folder for the connect flow, and Shared Lab Accounts for putting that folder in OneDrive / Drive / Dropbox / iCloud so your whole lab shares it.