Nimble’s First Steps

Hi, I’m Josh. I’m one of the developers at Bright, and I’m excited to talk to you about Nimble.

We released Nimble 1.0.0 11 days ago. At the time, there wasn’t any publicity. We decided to keep it that way for the time being, as we were still working on other issues, non-code related.

During these 11 days we were able to spot a few bugs and fix them, namely key bindings/accelerators.

Today, Nimble was posted on Product Hunt and Hacker News, and multiple articles were written about it, namely one on The Next Web. We’re excited to see Nimble gain popularity but we’re even more excited to see what you’ll all do with Nimble, and what sort of features you’ll recommend, such as Chris on Product Hunt recommending a Nimble workflow for Alfred.

Adam and I started working on Nimble in March of 2015. At the time we were working with what we knew of Objective-C and Xcode to built a prototype. After a few months of juggling school (we’re both students) and code, we were able to create a working version, but there were bugs scattered everywhere, and it was ugly, to boot. We tried switching to Swift as we thought it’d be easier to implement our features that way, but to no avail.

It was the start of December we decided to start using the Electron framework, from GitHub. It’s a great framework to work with, allowing us to write Nimble with front-end technologies (HTML, CSS, JS). The only downside to Electron is how large it is. Nimble, bundled with Electron, is over 170mb. We’ve been able to cut it down to around 150mb, and we’re still trying for smaller.

Now we’re primarily focused on adding subpod support to Nimble, as well as adding a “run on startup” option, and auto updating. Decreasing Nimble’s size is also a priority.

If you have any questions or concerns regarding Nimble, feel free to reach out to us on Twitter at @madebybright or email us at info@madebybright.com.