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Atlas: a visual IDE for desktop-like web apps
- dan_sim 18y agoWhy does so many people want to create desktop-like web apps? It's not a desktop, it's the web. It never worked and it always looked bad and unusable.
- sbecker 18y agoGmail? Google Docs? They work, look fine, and lots of people use them all day long.
- unalone 18y agoNeither of those are at all desktop-like. Google was arguably the first NON-desktop-like email emulator, because it didn't include things like drag-and-drop, focusing instead on what it could do well that a desktop app couldn't.
- ams6110 18y agoI think your last sentence answers your question.
- wmf 18y agoLaziness. We know what desktop apps are supposed to look like, but designing good Web apps is still more of an art.
- DenisM 18y agoreusing learned behavior is good for usability.
- adammarkey 18y agoThis could be a killer app for business applications. Having the development environment hooked up to the visual mockup designer is a key element for quickly bringing apps that the business likes and IT approves of. If they can get this right, there is a lot of money here. Especially considering the amount of lazy IT shops out there.
- dan_sim 18y agoThat's the problem with desktop-like UI, it's created by lazy developers. They used and learnt RAD ten years ago and they don't want to bother to learn HTML and how the web works.
- adammarkey 18y agoLazy developers are something corporations and IT departments have to live with. The good ones leave and end up working for startups or go independent. The great thing about an IDE like this is that it can be a foundation for RAD projects - it could let IT departments finally move those aging VB6 / Access applications to the web.
- ams6110 18y agoHTML and "the web" were designed as a simple information-sharing platform based on hyperlinked static text documents. Building actual business applications on top of this, even if you know how the web works, has always been pretty much a kludge.
- firebug 18y agoOr any kind of application thanks to the mess of standards that web developers have had to deal with. Atlas and Flex are an imperfect workaround for that problem.
- wmf 18y agoAtlas must appear pretty killer to people who haven't seen Flex Builder.
- adammarkey 18y agoFlex is very nice, but Flex uses a flash plugin as it's runtime. A flex application is compiled binary sent to the browser - doesn't sound very dynamic or open web to me. Cappucino uses good old XHTML and javascript. If you look at browser advancements in Javascript just in the past few months alone, 2 years from now technologies like flash may only be useful for very niche circumstances.
- lubos 18y agoI'm not impressed. Building RSS reader without writing a single line of code? This is not important at all. We all know anything else will take lots and lots of code to write. Also what's up with emulating desktop GUI on web? That's just dumb. When users see desktop GUI, they expect it to behave like desktop GUI as well. If their drag-and-drop and context menus fail, they think application is broken. Why would any sane developer want to confuse its users like this. No matter how good this IDE is... it's still for desktop-like web apps, failed branch of web-development, so it's already FAIL and waste of time of these talented programmers.
- boucher 18y agoWho says that drag and drop, or context menus, need to fail? And why would any sane user, who's spent the last 15 years getting used to the way desktop software works, want to switch to a completely different, entirely text based user interface? Any existing user of Office will feel far more comfortable in 280 Slides than in Google's presentation app. Desktop-class applications are not always the right answer, but to say they are never the right answer seems pretty silly.
- grinich 18y agoAs the world shifts from desktop software to web-based software, tools like this are going to be huge. Atlas is going to enable nearly every single cocoa developer to start making webapps instantly. No learning Rails or self-teaching JavaScript. Apple should have done this already. 280north has a huge headstart.
- skalpelis 18y agoApple used this to build its mobileme webapps.
- Timothee 18y agoWhat does Apple have to gain in having Cocoa developers developing web-apps instead of desktop apps? (serious question) If anything, I feel like it would actually be a bad thing: a web-app that looks like a (Mac) desktop app doesn't sell more Macs since it would run the same on any OS.
- grinich 18y agoWhy do they make iTunes for Windows?
- Timothee 18y agoFor iTunes, they do it because it makes them money by selling iPods and music. A better question to me would be "Why do they make Safari for Windows?". I'm not sure... is it to show different Apple software to Windows users and lure them into buying Macs? That sounds doubtful to me but I might be wrong. But my question was a serious question: what do you think Apple has to gain from getting the Cocoa/Obj-C developers to write web-apps in Obj-J?
- rjurney 18y agoEvery web app that I've ever created in my five years as a web developer has been ugly as hell, because neither I nor my employers could or would ever pay a good designer to make it pretty. I've spent literally years creating ugly things. This could change that. I likey. I likey a lot.