Three and a half years ago, Jesse Haff -- the cool kid down the street who introduced me to SimCity when I was eleven years old -- joined NationBuilder as co-founder, lead designer and employee #2. I had been coding for months and couldn't wait to get him started designing with our theming system. 

Since those early days of just the two of us, NationBuilder theming has been used to create thousands of sites, and today there are over 30 firms certified as NationBuilder Architects.

But there's one thing that Jesse has politely begged for since that first week: the ability to use the text editor on his Mac instead of the editor built into the browser.

Finally, on a hack day, in a beautiful moment of compassion, Charlie created a prototype. Months of tweaking and beta-testing later and it is finally ready. Introducing...

It's a Mac app that will let you download a theme to your computer and automatically upload any changes you make to the templates when you save them. So you can use your favorite text editor and see your changes within a second or two. It makes developing themes much faster and a lot more fun.

Download the app

But wait, there's more! In addition to being able to copy and share themes across nations, Lauren has built a feature that allows you to copy and share entire sites as well. This is particularly useful if you are a designer who wants to develop the site structure for a client on your own nation and then copy it over, but there are many uses:

• Nonprofits can offer subnations to all their chapters with a pre-built site and theme.
• Political parties can do the same for all their candidates.
• Universities for all their local alumni groups, etc.

Just go to Site Settings > Sharing to check it out. More details here.

We continue to invest a lot of time and effort into growing the NationBuilder community. We love you! Some of the most talented designers, consultants and developers are even starting their own companies just to serve leaders using NationBuilder. It's an exciting time, and I can't wait to see all the new sites, themes and apps the community will create.

I'm also happy that Jesse's life just got a bit easier...and that SimCity 5 will be out for the Mac in a couple of weeks. :)