Manual · The book

# Building & shipping

Test and release builds, signing, notarization — and the licence.

Building takes seconds, because there is no compiler in it: an application is Neuridion's precompiled shell plus your project as an encrypted payload. A bug we fix in the runtime is fixed in every application you rebuild.

Kind, products, signing, starting data — and a footer that names exactly what pressing the button will produce.

## Test build, release build

A test build is quick and unsigned — it runs on your Mac (and on any Mac whose owner right-clicks once, which is why it needs a licence exactly like a release). A release build is signed with your Developer ID, hardened, notarized by Apple and packaged — what a customer gets. The Apple half needs Apple's Developer Program (about 99 € a year, paid to Apple); Neuridion finds your certificate and notarization profile itself and says plainly when they are missing.

The same three products as a test build: two seconds against the release build's two and a quarter minutes — the difference is Apple's part, not ours. Signed ad-hoc, so this Mac will run it, and the window says exactly that.

## Products

One build can produce up to three applications: Single-user, and — with Neuridion PRO — the Client/Server pair. Each product wears its own icon (three wells in the Application tab; the standard icons are drawn as a family), each is notarized on its own, and the server carries the signed client inside itself for new desks and self-updates.

Every step named and timed, every produced file listed with its real size — four of them here, because Client/Server was ticked.

## What comes out

Just the applications, a zip, or a disk image — the one a customer expects: a window with the icons in it and an arrow to the Applications folder. It is drawn by us, not by a template, and a Client/Server build puts all three products in the same window.

What the customer double-clicks. Three icons, an arrow, one sentence.

## The application itself — its menu, its About, its icon

Three things belong to the application rather than to any window, and all three are edited before the build. The menu is yours: the items Neuridion supplies (Cut, Copy, Paste, the window commands) carry a padlock, because nothing else knows which control has the cursor — everything beside them runs a script of yours. The About window takes free text with bold, italic and working links. The icon is one picture; the Client and Server products get their own well, and every size is generated from what you drop in.

A real menu bar, edited by clicking it — and the padlock says which items are Neuridion's own and why.
Identity, the About text, and the icons — with the Client and Server identifiers derived from the one above, always.
And the result in the customer's hands: your text, your link, the version and build — plus the data model's version, for the support call.

## Starting data, stamp, updates

Starting data decides what the application finds on its very first launch — empty, chosen tables, or everything; an update never touches a customer's data. The build stamp is an imprint in the About window: which Neuridion built it, the name on the licence, the last four characters of the key and a short code derived from it. Read by nothing — take it out and the application behaves identically; it is there so a question of provenance has an answer, and it sits inside the sealed payload so the answer survives somebody editing an `Info.plist`. The key itself is not in there, and no part of it is ever consulted while the application runs. And the one sentence that never changes: nothing you build contains a licence check, phones home, or expires. What your application asks of its users is your business, never ours.