A ship is offline. The software should have been built that way.

A supply vessel on a field has a satellite link that is expensive, intermittent and shared with the crew’s video calls. A ship in a fjord has nothing at all for hours. A machinery space has nothing ever.

Almost every ship management system handles that with a synchronisation job and a spinner. The crew learns within a fortnight that the system cannot be trusted at the moment they need it, and starts keeping the real record on paper and in a spreadsheet — which is the state most shipowners are actually in, underneath whatever they bought.

NoRemarks is built the other way round. The device holds the vessel’s data and every rule that governs it. Nothing waits for a server. When the link returns, the device sends what it did and takes what it missed, and a conflict between two devices is resolved by a rule that gives both of them the same answer.

The domain — what a permit may do next, when a drill falls due, whether a rest-hour record breaches the fourteen-hour rule, whether this person may approve this requisition — is a single pure package with no database and no user interface in it.

The tablet runs it. The server runs the same code. That is why a refusal on board is the same refusal ashore, why an offline write is never quietly rejected on arrival, and why a rule that is fixed is fixed everywhere at once.

• Every rule has a test. A change to a permission, a role, an interval or a constraint is not accepted without a test that pins it. There are over two hundred on the server alone.
• Code checks permissions, never titles. Nothing in the product asks whether somebody is a master. It asks whether they may do this, here, today — which is what survives a company that names its positions differently.
• Three registers cannot be edited at all. The oil record book, the controlled-drugs control book and the rest-hour chain have no edit path in the code, rather than a permission nobody is given.

A company adds its own vessel, its own departments, its own positions and its own people, on its own afternoon. There is no implementation project, no onboarding fee and no consultant between a shipowner and its own data.

That is a commercial decision as much as a technical one. A register only the vendor can change stops being true within a year, and a customer who cannot leave is a customer who has stopped being asked whether the product is any good.