James Gill / February 24, 2009
280 Atlas – Build Beautiful Web Apps in Minutes. On the Web
280 North, the guys that brought you 280 Slides (the slickest web app yet for building Keynote style presentations) and the next generation web app development framework Cappuccino, have just announced their latest creation - 280 Atlas.
280 Atlas is a web app, built with Cappuccino, designed to make it easy for others to build advanced, beautiful web apps with unrivalled ease. Check out the video to get an idea of just how simple they have made the UI design process. It in some ways makes me think of Interface Builder in the development tools that come with OS X, but I have to remind myself that these are online. It's not this easy to build web app interfaces in any desktop apps I can think of.
When you think of what Adobe is doing, attempting to make it easier for design professionals to get building applications on the web and the desktop (via AIR), this puts them to shame. The web will be a better place with more web apps built on open source technologies like Cappuccino. If the next round of web apps are anything like 280 Slides, then things are going to get very exciting around here.
Keep your eyes on 280 Atlas, and the 280 North team. They are moving the industry forward at a staggering pace, and it's up to us, the developers and designers, to start building web apps that not only compete, but outperform what's on the desktop.
Dan Denney said,
February 24, 2009 at 11:22 pm ()
Things like this keep me on the neverending quest for more skills. This looks amazing!
James said,
February 24, 2009 at 11:47 pm ()
Yeah, 280 North just keep amazing me. It's astonishing what can be done within a browser window.
I need to get learning Objective-J and the Cappuccino framework so I can start working on stuff like this!
Quentin said,
February 25, 2009 at 5:38 am ()
I think it's pretty impressive what they've been able to do with their js stuff, but sliderocket still blows the competition away as far as web based presentation authoring goes. JS is great for the interface and stuff, but real, innovative, multimedia presentation work still needs a multimedia backend, js simply can't supply that like flash/flex can.
That being said, this 280 Atlas stuff looks great for building js based applications, but, again, depending on what that app does, it's pertinent to make sure that js is the right tool for the job. I am impressed with what they're doing, but saying they're putting everyone else to shame is a bit over the top. Web based apps are great, until your net connection goes down.
James said,
February 25, 2009 at 4:17 pm ()
I agree, if 280Slides was lacking in one respect, it was the animation and motion effects available - there (to my knowledge) are still no slide transition or object animation settings available in the app.
The great thing about some of the latest web apps is that as soon as your internet connection is lost it does not necessarily mean the app is unusable - Google Gears allows services like Google Reader and even Wordpress administration to be usable even while you're not connected to the internet.
I realise that Flash has its uses - for instance we still use Flash to show traffic data in Accounts on GoSquared. There is still nothing better than Flash for building great graphs that visualise complex data in an interactive way. However, it is clear that 280 North are a long way ahead of many other web app development firms in that they are building software that is comparable to desktop software, on foundations that are strikingly different.
Philip Downer said,
February 25, 2009 at 6:14 pm ()
Wow! I need to start reading and learning this... I've got my work cut out for me!
Erkan said,
March 2, 2009 at 6:48 pm ()
:) Yeah, 280 North just keep amazing me. It's astonishing what can be done within a browser window.
I need to get learning Objective-J and the Cappuccino framework so I can start working on stuff like this!
hayrettin said,
March 2, 2009 at 6:50 pm ()
Hmm Thank
ryan said,
August 1, 2009 at 10:19 pm ()
i totally agree with Quentin, saying that Atlas is putting everyone else to shame is a bit of an over statement to say the least...
1.)Things I don't like about Atlas are that everything seems to look like an Apple interface which dandy if you into that sort of thing but honestly? What if my client is Sony?
2.)The learning curve of yet another language like Objective-J is a total put off, of course a solid community and very comprehensive documentation could help but it still takes time...
Have you looked into Google GWT? You could have just as easily skinned any app framework be it .NET/GWT/Flex/Ajax framework of your choice... there is nothing about Atlas that jumps out at me and makes me want to spend the time and money...
gary said,
August 21, 2009 at 6:10 pm ()
280slides is awesome and atls is looking good, but as Ryan says there are other JS frameworks which are just as capable, moo, jquery, extjs etc.
The thing I find astonishing about cappucino though is since it has been created by some mac devs you would think webapps built using the framework would render on mobile safari (iphone) well they dont!
James Gill said,
August 21, 2009 at 7:52 pm ()
@Ryan
OK, so perhaps they are not quite putting everyone "to shame" as I said, but the foundations of what they have built are incredibly advanced, and appear to be a major step forward in the web application space. Let's not forget that other languages like Actionscript (of Flash) requires the Flash plug-in on the client side, same with Flex.
The amazing thing about Cappuccino is that, despite requiring a new language for many developers to learn, the user receives a desktop application style experience without needing to install anything more than the browser itself.
Simply skinning an app built in HTML and CSS and a js framework like mootools (which we use throughout the site) or script.aculo.us doesn't give the same level of desktop style experience without extensive work. It's a lot about the fundamental way the framework has been thought out - with a view to creating applications - nothing other than SproutCore takes the same fundamental approach.
With regards to making everything look "Apple-esque", the UI images they have included were designed to be platform agnostic, and were made especially for Cappuccino. That said, they do still look more Apple inspired than, say, Sony inspired. I know that if we were to use the framework we wouldn't want to use their button styles as they don't match our styling. Thankfully as it's entirely open source, you can customise all of the images yourself. So this becomes a non-issue.
@Gary
There is no reason for apps built using Cappuccino to not work on the iPhone. In fact I just tried one of their demo apps - Lights Off - on my iPhone and it seems to work great: http://cappuccino.org/learn/demos/LightsOff/
Either way, there's a lot of promise here.
James