Simon is a tool that allows you to quick get up and running with a node-webkit application. Currently only supported for OSX.

It works in such a way that it is actually a container for your node-webkit application. The idea is that you create your app locally like so:

- MyApp
  - MyApp.app/
  - app/
    - index.html
    - assets/
    - pages
  - package.json

All of your source code goes into app/. You may modify the structure of this how you like. Simon automaticly generates the assets and pages directories for you but you don't need to use them if you don't want to.

Simon sits in the root of your project along side app/ and package.json. As of now it is only a good idea to use this for new projects. Code will be added at a later stage to support existing node-webkit projects although it doesn't take long for you to manually adapt the directory structure to support this.

Here is an example of how you can get started with Simon:

$ mkdir MyApp
$ cd MyApp
$ git clone https://github.com/hazbo/simon.git
$ cd simon
$ ./install MyApp

This will generate all the relevant files you will need to be up and running. If you cd out of the simon directory you will see that it has generated the app directory and a sample index.html file inside there for you.

It also generates a build script inside the simon directory which packages your app up and runs in within an instance of node-webkit. You can do this like so:

$ cd simon # if you're not already in there
$ ./build

You will see your app (or the sample app) build and run in node-webkit.

So why would you use this as appose to just manually running your own instance of node-webkit?

What Simon does is actually caches your application on your local machine. Currently what is being worked on is auto-updates. These the the kind of updates you will be able to distribute to everyone using the app without any one having to re-download the whole application.

Currently auto-updates are not finished yet and Simon should be used for testing / development purposes as if you release an app build using Simon out into the wild it will not work.

• Migrate index.html JavaScript to seperate file
• Create a spec for how Simon will check for the latest version of the app
• Test being able to pull down remote applications and install them locally

• Fork Simon
• Create a feature branch (git checkout -b my-feature)
• Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
• Push to your feature branch (git push origin my-feature)
• Create new Pull Request