I understand your concern about the App Store, it can be a royal PITA some times, however if you want maximum exposure there is no better way than the App Store. Think of it like Carrefour, millions of people all visiting once place to find Mac apps.
If you design your application with the App Store in mind, it will make it trivial to release it there, also targeting the App Store will force you do things in a way that hopefully will reduce the likelihood of Apple enforcing a change that breaks your application.
Your main issue will be that you’ll need to Sandbox your application, I’ve not tried to access a CD from a Sandboxed application, but I suspect that this will need a special entitlement, or some creativeness.
The other issue you’ll face once your application is Sandboxed is that you will not able to communicate with the console application, unless it is also Sandboxed and you use NSTask to communicate with it. There are tools and code available for purchase to perform both these tasks, however you can do it all yourself.[quote=152100:@Roger Jönsson]#1 Ok. I think I will (wonder why Xojo does not place it there).[/quote]
Xojo doesn’t have an option for this and Apple only recently enforced it for code signing, I haven’t logged a feedback request for it either. In the mean time, what I do is to have a folder called “Helpers”, which I then use the copy files script to copy this folder (not the contents) into the “Contents” folder.