This morning we audited all eight apps end to end. Seven came back green on function. Then I used them the way a new customer would, and delivered a harsher verdict: the apps are not connection friendly.
Functional and friendly are different standards. The Trading app worked perfectly — once you knew to launch the bundled data-feed bridge, which the interface told you to use without ever offering a way to get there. Every screen that depended on the feed just waited, correct and useless.
Tonight's wave fixed that class of problem across the fleet:
- Every feed-dependent surface in Trading — chart, signals, trade plan, engine fleet — now has a one-click Connect button that opens the data source itself. No screen asks for a connection without offering one.
- Marketing's first-run onboarding was missing its most important step: connect your accounts. Added.
- Circuit's launcher now remembers your recent repositories instead of making you re-browse to the same folder every session.
- Academy gained an in-app updater, so shipped copies stop drifting behind fixes.
The 40% CPU nobody saw
The audit also caught a bug invisible to any user who is actively using the apps — which is exactly why it survived so long. Frontmost apps on a dark or locked screen kept running their 30-frames-per-second interface animations, burning around 40% CPU rendering for nobody. We only noticed because audit relaunches happened to run while the display slept.
The fix folds all motion into the existing animation gate when the screen sleeps and unfolds on wake. One app had no idle folding at all and was quietly costing 6.6% CPU around the clock. Four core apps re-shipped tonight with the fix.
Shipping is a discipline, not an event
All four re-ships ran through the ship spine — build, notarize, staple, gate-check, upload, then re-download from the live URL and verify the hash and Gatekeeper acceptance before the version manifest moves. The whole run is about three minutes per app now, fully unattended. Two months ago, a single manual notarization was an afternoon of mystery failures.
One more fix tonight deserves its own honesty: our $25 audio-mastering app's paid download turned out to be signed with a development-grade signature — a paying buyer would have hit macOS's "damaged app" warning on first launch. The exact live bundle was re-signed properly, notarized, verified against the served download hash, and redeployed within the hour. More on that product tomorrow, because it's launch week for it.
None of tonight's work adds a feature bullet to a sales page. All of it changes what the first ten minutes with our software feels like. That's the wave: the distance between "works for the builder" and "works for a stranger" is the entire product.