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.

The build sheet: kind, products, signing, starting data — 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.

A finished test build: two seconds, three applications, signed ad-hoc — 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.

A finished build: every step ticked, four files produced — 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.

The finished disk image: three application icons and an arrow to the Applications folder — 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.

The menu editor: a real menu bar, a menu open, the supplied items marked with a padlock — A real menu bar, edited by clicking it — and the padlock says which items are Neuridion's own and why.

The Application tab: identity, About text, and the three icon wells — Identity, the About text, and the icons — with the Client and Server identifiers derived from the one above, always.

The About window of a built application, with the text the developer wrote and the build stamp — 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.