25 Feb Atlas by 280North

The future of web applications is bright. While I use Adobe’s applications a lot daily, I’m by no means a fan of their overpriced and badly designed products. That’s exactly why I am so pleased to see a product like 280North’s Atlas, a type of Xcode / Interface Builder for Cappuccino, their powerful web application framework.

Currently, very intensive, desktop-quality web applications either use Adobe’s Flash, or a very barebones interface that works using Javascript and HTML. I love the latter approach; standards compliant, plugin-less applications fills my heart with joy. It wasn’t really desktop-quality, though, and this is a huge step in the right direction.

I’d love to see web applications like Aviary’s created in this; the Flash plugin makes these great applications sadly unusable on a Mac.

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9 Responses

  1. 1
    Matt 

    This excites me very much. Cappuccino is already a powerful framework for creating rich and complex web applications. 280 Slides and now the Atlas application itself have proven just what is possible with todays set of open standards and browsers.

    Atlas brings even more hope for a brighter future with rich and interactive web applications.

  2. 280 North keep amazing me – first they build a Keynote style presentation app that stands out miles in front of the competition from big firms like Google, and now they go a step further in allowing a multitude of developers to build similar desktop style, highly polished apps.

    Not only will 280 North allow people to build better web apps than ever before, but, from the demo, it looks like it will make it easier than ever before too.

    You can tell these guys used to work at Apple. Not by the UI, but by their thought process and their ability to bring out superior products with a smaller team in less time than major companies that have been in the game for several years.

  3. 3
    Mess 

    You excite me so much man, but when I submitted the e-mail address they just told me they’ll keep me up to date on its announcements.

  4. 4
    Doug May 

    If you like more edgy interfaces, try Pixelmator. It’s HUD, let me know what you think about the buttons. The price tag is low, and so is the memory footprint. I really enjoy the speed of the application. It’s a alternative to Photoshop, and I think it’s great. Try it out. http://www.pixelmator.com/

    It also may work well with a tablet like the one you have. It seems to be well designed for that…but don’t take my word on it cause I’ve never used a tablet in my whole life. I usually scan images instead. (I’d like a tablet though.)

  5. 5
    Max 

    OMFG! goodbye interface builder! welcome atlas!!!!!

  6. 6
    Itai Ferber 

    This looks amazing! I worked with Cappuccino slightly in the past, but it was too much of a pain to actually get working.
    This’ll certainly kick stuff into gear!

  7. does it create web/desktop application for mac OS in such an easy way as shown at clip ?

  8. 8
    RP 

    I am trying to get into writing a database tool, i have lot of stand alone database scripts that does lot of monitoring and alerts. I was trying to find a write platform to write own. Atlas looks promising for me. Do you think cappuccino can handle write such applications ?

  1. […] The future of web applications is bright. 280North is changing the way we product web apps. A while ago they introduced Cappuccino, a framework to build web applications with Objective J and Javascript. This week on FOWA Miami they introduced Atlas, a type of Xcode / Interface Builder to create apps with Cappuccino. Watch the video below. (via) […]