BetaExpiration

Example showing how to implement a usable expiring beta to macOS apps.

Setup

⚠️ It doesn't make sense to put the example setup directly into your project.

That's because you frequently will want to modify BetaExpiration.swift. The library code has a hard-coded expiration date. You will want to change this with ongoing releases. To make this a Carthage or CocoaPods library would be useless.

There are two variants that'll work:

1. You can copy the files from the library over to your project.
2. You can check the whole project out (as a git submodule, for example) and include it as a sub-project in your app.

Whatever you do, it's important that you can easily change the expiration date in BetaExpiration.swift.

Integration

1. Hard code a new expiration date in BetaExpiration.expiresAt. You can compute the date by running the unit tests and looking at the console output.
2. Change the alert in BetaExpiration.guardExpiration() to show your e-mail address.
3. Call BetaExpiration.guardExpiration() from your AppDelegate. This will display an alert and quit the app if the beta period is over.
4. Optional: Decorate your app window with useful information for your beta testers, see below.

Window decoration

The decoration is achieved by adding a NSTitlebarAccessoryViewController to the window. The format is as follows:

 β v1.2.0 (107) - 23 days left
     ^      ^     ^
     |      |     |__  = (today - expiration date)
     |      |
     |      |__ build number
     |
     |__ version

You get all of this by calling BetaExpiration.decorate(window:hostBundle:). The hostBundle should be your app's main Bundle because that'll include version and build number information.

Code License

Copyright (c) 2017-2019 Christian Tietze. Distributed under the MIT License.