Iris

The publik desktop assistant. Split out of Blueturboguy07/publik on 2026-08-25, with the history of every file that came along.

publik keeps the server half — /api/iris/guides, /api/iris/apps, /api/iris/recipes, /api/assistant/chat and the rest. Those routes are the contract, and they are the only thing the clients here genuinely share.

Three clients, and why

	what it is	state
iris-macos/	Swift, ~47k lines. The eye, the input bar, install guides, guide autopilot, maintain mode, the on-demand edit loop.	active — where the work happens
iris-windows/	Electron + TypeScript, ~18k lines. A behavioural reimplementation of the parts of the above that have been ported.	behind — last commit 2026-08-19
iris-desktop/	Tauri, ~3.5k lines. A guide viewer: show a guide, open a link, check a tool version. This is the original Orbit app, renamed to Iris in July 2026.	frozen since 2026-08-10, and superseded

They share no code. Not a file, not a symlink, not a generated artifact. iris-windows is a reimplementation of iris-macos in a different language, and iris-desktop predates both. Everything iris-desktop can do is a strict subset of what the other two can do.

Why iris-desktop is still here

It is not needed as an app, and it should go. Three things have to move first:

1. .github/workflows/iris-release.yml still ships it. The build-macos job runs cd iris-desktop and uploads the result under the artifact name iris-macos; build-windows does the same. The Swift app builds a side artifact that is never attached to a release, and the Electron app is not in that workflow at all. Repoint those two jobs before deleting anything.

2. It holds the widest copy of the guide host allowlist. fn allowed_external_host in src-tauri/src/main.rs lists 29 hosts; publik's lib/iris-allowed-hosts.ts, ExternalLinkPolicy.swift and external-links.ts list 22. The seven extra — fal.ai, nasm.us, chromewebstore.google.com, docs.google.com, blueturboguy07.github.io and two www. forms — were added on 2026-08-10 for the Halation, Nutcracker and Dripwriter Origin guides and never propagated. publik's guide test validated published links against this list, so four live guide steps pass CI and cannot be opened by any shipping client. publik's TypeScript constant is canonical now; that divergence is a real bug, not a merge artifact.

3. iris-windows/src/renderer/guide/ is a copy of iris-desktop/ui/. styles.css is byte-identical; app.js differs by 35 lines. Un-copy it or accept that deleting iris-desktop orphans the original.

Also worth knowing: iris-desktop and iris-macos both declare the bundle identifier com.publikhq.iris, both build an Iris.app, and both register the iris:// scheme. They cannot be installed on the same Mac.

Building

macOS, the Swift app — this is the one to use locally. It signs with a real Developer ID rather than ad-hoc, which is the difference between granting Accessibility once and granting it after every single build:

scripts/deploy-iris-local.sh

Never run xcodebuild against the Swift app from a terminal without that script's signing step; see iris-macos/AGENTS.md.

Windows, the Electron app:

cd iris-windows && pnpm install && pnpm dev

Release builds go through .github/workflows/iris-release.yml (macOS + Tauri today) and iris-windows.yml (Electron).

The one thing to watch

Nothing tells you when the clients diverge. Across the entire history of the original repository, no commit ever touched both iris-macos and iris-windows — 123 commits to one, 54 to the other, intersection zero. Parity holds exactly where macOS stopped moving and nowhere else: crash and hang detection match constant for constant, while the Tier-C edit loop caps at 500 steps on macOS and 12 on Windows, and the on-demand edit coordinator, feature engine and watch loop have no Windows counterpart at all.

tests/ at this root exists for cross-client checks. There is one so far.