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New Product From 280North: Atlas
- hbien 18y agoThat's pretty amazing. It's like Interface Builder but for Cappuccino ... and as a web app. I can't believe how awesome these guys are, I hope Apple acquires them and starts using their technology for MobileMe + iWork.
- numair 18y agoIf you knew anything about what happened to WebObjects, you would be hoping that such a scenario never occurred.
- mpc 18y agoA summary of that would be great.... I know that Apple pushed WebObjects to the back burner when they acquired NeXT in the mid 90s but I'm not sure why it would be bad for them to buy 280 North today.
- bonaldi 18y agoUnless there's a clear way for something to shift hardware, Apple isn't really interested in it. WebObjects has languished, despite being killer in more than one respect. An update (and de-java-ing) of WO tools with something like Atlas integrated would be absolutely killer, but unless it helps them shift more Macs in big numbers, I don't see it going anywhere.
- gstar 18y agoMy punt is that Apple is going to make a big enterprise play in the next 2-3 years. Time is ripe, and it can be done without a big investment in capital. Wait until Steve Jobs publicly denounces enterprise IT as a business with no future. He'll be right, in more ways than one.
- jacquesm 18y agoLet's hope that Steve Jobs is still going to be around in 2-3 years. I'm no groupie but I'd hate to see him go.
- mikeryan 18y agoiWork, iCal server etc. Apple is in the middle of a large enterprise play. It's just not a big marketing push yet, they're likely waiting for the product to mature a bit.
- dmix 18y ago"-enterprise IT as a business with no future. He'll be right, in more ways than one." Can you clarify? Because that seems very misinformed. Unless you mean on-premise deployments, which has been on the way out for years. With SaaS + cloud computing, Enterprise IT is just starting to get interesting again.
- gstar 18y agoI can't give this topic the justice it deserves in an HN comment, but yes I'll clarify. In 10 years time, the "IT Department" virtually won't exist at most small-mid size businesses. I think a lot of business software is going to be taken off-the-peg, or plug-boarded from open source software as interfaces approach ubiquity and organisations like government, banking and b2b start to expose consistent "APIs". It's already happening now. We also have gen X and Y moving into senior management and the internet generation actually moving into work. Computer skills are getting to the point of being virtually innate. Acquiring computer equipment will be analogous in business to buying a photocopier or some other office equipment. </crystalball>
- pxlpshr 18y agoAbsolutely agree with you on all points. I've been saying this for a few years too, and you see it happening now with cloud computing replacing IT guys in startups. I'm actually very happy this is occurring because more than 50% of the time, dealing with the IT guy is like dealing with a bad police officer. It seems like they're always on some kind of misplaced power trip...
- cturner 18y ago> A summary of that would be great.... Heh. Serious power, terrible polish. They blew off all the NeXT veterans when they destroyed it as an objective-c development platform, but didn't finish the job of porting it to Java for five years so you ended up working on this platform that feels like a developed-in-isolation mainframe monster. Dev tools looked nice but made you want to slit your wrists from random crashes and other strangeness. There were a couple of periods where they looked like they would kill it which was stressful for people with codebases on it. All efforts at documentation did a very poor job of selling its incredible patterns and features. But everyone I know who stuck at it has done well - many ended up at Apple working on very cool projects. I'd love to read a history of whoever wrote it one day - it was so far ahead of its time - I've got a theory that they had some people on it who had done serious research and practical time on some sort of web-like thin-client platform that pre-dated the web. Culture in Apple is different now too.
- tlrobinson 18y agoWe don't plan on creating a Java version of Cappuccino and killing off the Objective-J API any time soon ;)
- dizm 18y agoI believe some if not all of the guys working at 280 North are ex-Apple engineers.
- ktom 18y agoabsolutely stunning!
- swivelmaster 18y agoMind blown.
- fuelfive 18y agoThis is incredible, excellent work guys
- joubert 18y agoÜbercool. Can't wait to no longer have to build views in code. Seems like there is a good text editor being used in Atlas, hopefully this will make its way into Cappuccino soon!!
- mikeryan 18y agoI love what these guys are doing - I'm just not sold on the whole Objective-J thing.
- kqr2 18y agoDoes anyone know of any large projects using Objective-J / Cappuccino besides 280North?
- richcollins 18y agoWere currently using it: http://stylous.com/ http://stylous.com/
- kqr2 18y agoNice. Any pros and cons that you can share?
- richcollins 18y agoThe biggest issue we've had with Cappuccino is problems with older machines running IE. Given some time they will be gone and it won't be an issue.
- joubert 18y agoCool. I browsed some of the products. Is it possible to browse by sex? When I was looking at shoes, I saw stilettos, even though I'm not shopping for my weekly drag show in Las Vegas.
- richcollins 18y agoSorry just women's accessories for now :-P
- andreyf 18y agoFor 10x better usability, pre-cache your images!
- gstar 18y agoFantastic. RAD tools for the web haven't ever been done properly. This could be huge. The funny thing is, it actually looks quicker and easier than IB - probably because Objective-J is interpreted and runs in the browser, and it has the controllers in Atlas.
- cpr 18y agoIt's fascinating to watch the re-invention of the browser as a NeWS server (client in normal terminology) from nearly 20 years ago. Postscript imaging model == HTML5 Canvas, Postscript == Javascript. Hmm...
- wmf 18y agoBut was NeWS a good idea? It seemed excessively complex to me, just like AJAX.
- cpr 18y agoI didn't mean to imply it was a good idea, just that this model, like X Windows, has already been tried before (and found wanting?).
- andreyf 18y agoThe one difference is that everyone has and knows how to use a browser, or what to do if you tell them to open myfoo.com. What percentage of the computer population knows what X Windows is, much less has any idea how to use it?
- scotth 18y agoWhat do you find to be complex about AJAX?
- mcav 18y agoFascinating... though I now feel like an old assembly programmer saying things like "In my day, we wrote Javascript by hand, and it only consumed suchandsuch memory and was blazing fast... now you with your newfangled GUI builders..."
- jacquesm 18y agoBorland cbuilder meets the web, very impressive.
- deleted 18y ago[deleted]
- releasedatez 18y agocan't seem to get on right now.
- poub 18y agoYou can watch the video there: http://www.viddler.com/explore/boucher/videos/1/ http://www.viddler.com/explore/boucher/videos/1/
- releasedatez 18y agoThank you very much
- cjoh 18y agoThis really is amazing. But it makes me nervous. I'm open to the idea, but just as I prefer using a text editor to write my HTML code rather than Dreamweaver, I'm concerned that this can take me too far away from my web app code. Like any other tool, in order to use it effectively you have to master the tool just like you'd master a language. Hopefully what's under the hood here and the code it generates makes it easy to do that.
- joubert 18y agoIn order to build views with Cappuccino today, I'm doing it by hand (i.e. subclassing for example a CPView and constructing child visuals) - this means instancing elements such as CPTextField, CPButton, etc. and adding it to a view. But being able to do it visually ala Interface Builder with similar semantics around delegates, subclassing, IBAction and Outlet concepts will rock - speeding up development time tremendously.
- cschneid 18y agoCappuccino doesn't use html as it's main language. HTML / CSS / Javascript are Cappuccino's assembly language. You write everything in their Obj-J language (which is a cross between Javascript & Obj-C. And apparently actually all legal javascript).
- d13hard 18y agoit is cool, but these tools exist for desktop apps too yet no one i know actually uses them. the problem continues to be generated code...its bloated, has performance issues, and can't be maintained as easily as it can be created
- andreyf 18y agoVery nice, although the demo seems a bit overly-staged. My prediction: the quality of their debugger will make or break this company.
- s3graham 18y agoVery snazzy! I don't know how y'all plan to make money, but don't get too caught up in dev tools! They're fun, and might be good marketing, but be sure they're actually saving time against making the thing that people with money actually want.
- fauigerzigerk 18y agoThese guys are awesome and I feel kind of bad to say this, but it's the perferction of a failed idea. I've been trying these kinds of GUI builders for almost 20 years, starting with VB and PowerBuilder, and I always ended up not actually using them. The usual criticism is that they generate awful code, but that's not necessarily the case. The problem is really that these tools ask you to keep clicking on lots of little sliders and lines and bars and shapes and then click over there in that text box to enter a name and then select this or that from a list or menu, wait until that three pixel graphic changes its shape into a handle so you can drag that line over here, etc, and there's no way to automate this. It's a matter of taste whether you like to do it that way when you create _one_ form, but once you create an application or two or three you have to abstract from the repeating patterns and you can't do that with the GUI builder. GUI builders make you stay on the same level of abstraction forever because they don't have the equivalent of meta programming or even just plain procedural programming. The reason why code built with GUI builders is so awful is not so much that they necessarily generate bad code. It's that developers who can put up with repeating the same clicks and drags on the same level of abstraction for years and years are in the wrong profession and create bad code regardless of the tools. Programming is all about abstracting and automating stuff. The pinnacle of GUI builder based abstraction is what Microsoft calls "user controls". All they abstract is a bunch of widgets statically glued together on a panel. Great, but that's like 5% of what you want to do. I'm afraid GUI builders are hopeless for any serious programming.
- allertonm 18y agoI agree with a lot of what you say here, and have had much the same experience, but there is one powerful counter-example in Apple's "Interface Builder". I get the impression that most Cocoa developers use it for at least some part of their code.
- gstar 18y agoYou've got some good points, but Interface Builder (and I imagine Atlas) departs fundamentally from VB and PowerBuilder in that the code doesn't live directly behind the GUI elements. Instead, it's connected by a series of inlets and outlets that are designed to allow for reusability and model-view-controller disconnect. You can also define UI things in code in Cappuccino (as well as Obj-C). IB is optional with Obj-C, and I imagine Atlas will be optional with Cappuccino.
- jli 18y agoI think this has some potential to allow more developers to publish a web app with at least a decent looking ui. There are a lot of good backend developers who happen to be bad at ui, this might allow more potential customers to view the product instead of being horrified as soon as they saw the ui.
- pclark 18y agowish sites would put a textual description below videos.
- 10ren 18y agoA visual IDE in a browser. Very cool. Is it fast/responsive enough to not be annoying? No demo yet. And I wish they had a one-line pitch.
- rman666 18y agoTried to get to it last nite and this morning. No luck. Is it the "slashdot" effect, or is something else going on?
- tlrobinson 18y agoSorry about that. We're still in a hotel in Miami with shitty Internet. Will be back in California tonight and everything should be smooth sailing after that.
- epall 18y agoSo, when do we get to play with it??
- poub 18y agoI’m using a lot Interface Builder to generate my Capuccino views using their tool nib2cib. Atlas is going to save me a lot of time. Sure you can still edit the plist by hand or programatically but I don’t find it more efficient neither easier.