  Designing and optimizing ion optical systems is often a complex and difficult
task, which requires the use of computational tools to iterate and converge
towards the desired characteristics and performances of the system. Very often
these tools are not well adapted for exploring the numerous degrees of freedom,
rendering the process long and tedious, as well as somewhat random due to the
very large number of local minima typically found when looking for a particular
optical solution. This paper presents a novel approach to finding the desired
solution of an optical system, by providing the user with an instant feedback
of the effects of changing parameters. The process of finding an approximate
solution by manually adjusting parameters is greatly facilitated, at which
point the final tune can be calculated by minimization according to a number of
constraints.
