Brightfield

A native macOS app that renders chart specs and protocol graphs on your GPU. One binary, no server, no account.

Brightfield is a native macOS app that renders chart specs and protocol graphs on your GPU — a single binary, no server, no webview, no account. It reports nothing: no telemetry, no update check. It needs no network to start, to render, or to open a local protocol.

It opens on a gallery of starting points that ship inside the binary — the EDGAR ↔ GLEIF crosswalk as a lineage graph, plus three charts — so the first thing you see is a rendered result, not an empty window.

Early access — v0.1.0, macOS only

Brightfield is in early development. Expect breaking changes to spec semantics, CLI arguments, and rendering output between releases; pin a version if stability matters (the install script takes one — see below). Apple silicon and Intel are both built. A Linux build is on the way — join the waitlist on /brightfield.

Install

curl -fsSL https://install.meridian.online/brightfield | bash

The script downloads the release for your Mac, verifies its SHA256 checksum, keeps the whole archive — binary, LICENSE, and the bundled example specs — under ~/.brightfield/cli/, and links brightfield into ~/.local/bin. To pin a version, pass it through:

curl -fsSL https://install.meridian.online/brightfield | bash -s -- v0.1.0

brew install meridian-online/tap/brightfield

Homebrew installs the binary alone. The example specs travel in the release archive if you want them on disk.

Then run it:

brightfield

The window opens on the Welcome door. The quick start walks the first five minutes.

What works today

The Welcome door — four starting points ship inside the binary, each one opening on a rendered result: the EDGAR ↔ GLEIF crosswalk lineage, a signals dashboard, a histogram, and a ranked breakdown.
Portable specs — author charts and dashboards as YAML or JSON in the Mosaic spec grammar; specs written for Mosaic's web environment should work unchanged. Marks cover dot, bar, line, area, density, regression, geo, hexbin, contour, and raster; interactions cover pan, zoom, brush, toggle, and cross-filtered selections across views.
Local data, directly — Parquet, CSV, JSON, inline data, and DuckDB database files load straight into a spec.
Offline by default — every bundled example draws with the network switched off. Brightfield reaches out only when a spec names a remote source; a spec over local files touches nothing.

Not yet

Linux and Windows — macOS is the only built target today. Leave your email on /brightfield and we'll tell you the moment the Linux build lands.
Stability — v0.1.0 is an early preview. Spec semantics, CLI arguments, and rendering output can change between releases; pin a version if that matters for your use case.
Guided walkthroughs — the Welcome door's Learn zone is a placeholder for now.

Where it sits

Brightfield is the rendering end of the Meridian toolchain: Arcform runs the pipeline, Finetype types the columns, and Brightfield draws the result — charts from specs, and protocols as lineage graphs, node by node. The crosswalk it opens on is the same one you can query in your browser at /datasets/edgar_gleif.

The source is open — MIT, on GitHub — with v0.1.0 release notes covering the archive's contents and a script that proves the offline claim against the packaged binary itself.

Next steps

Start here

Five minutes from install to a rendered crosswalk.

Quick start

Open the Welcome door, render the EDGAR ↔ GLEIF crosswalk, and come Home.

The Brightfield page

Install commands, release notes, and the Linux waitlist.

See the source

MIT-licensed on GitHub — build it yourself, or read how it draws.