pg, please, please get the people building awesome tools to become ridiculously profitable like Wufoo! I so wanted to use 280 North but I was scared they would get bought and vanish. My fear came true. EDIT: Half true. No word yet on what Motorola is going to do with them.
Congrats to the 280 Norths, YC, and their other investors. Let's all join hands and pray that Motorola allows development on Cappuccino et al to remain public.
I can't see why a VC firm would argue against a huge exit that makes everyone a ton of money and leaves the founders working on the same product they built and love.
This led into a discussion that YC's policy is to just do what is in the startup's interest - if they want an exit, then YC will support that. And after slaving your guts out, pretty soon $20 million in the hand is starting to look pretty dang good! pg mentioned that instead of trying to calculate exactly what is in YC's interest, with so many startups going, the simplest approach is just to do what's in the startup's interest. I think everyone - including pg and future candidates - also feel a lot more comfortable with this approach.
But I have to say: $20 million! That's freakin awesome! It's presumptuous of me, but I feel really proud of you guys. Go go go! And thanks also for posting a figure; that's usually secret.
I have little doubt that it will. Will Motorola ever care as much about their platform as Apple does?
The obvious fit within their existing lineup would be for Motorola to relaunch-their-existing/make-a-new phone OS with superb Cappuccino support.
Worst of all the attention that one development tool or team gets, reduces the attention that other teams get. As a competitor (former competitor?), I sincerely congratulate 280North, but to suggest that they're the only ones building awesome tools is the furthest from the truth.
Edit: No reason to down-vote this. No animosity should be read here. I was just saying there are other cool development tools. I congratulate 280North.
To me the post sounded as if the poster was suggesting they're were no other cool development tools that were on-par with Cappuccino, thus we should all mourn if they stopped developing. The poster if you recall was not a Cappuccino developer.
It's in my opinion, and I'm sure in many others, that there are many other cool development tools, some of which are on-par, if not better in various ways than Cappuccino, many of which don't get the attention or appreciation they should get.
Don't underestimate this effect.
I stand by what I said: Merely stating that there are "other cool tools" is empty. Somebody else may as well respond, "Nah, other tools suck." Since we're not talking about anything in reality, nobody will be right or wrong, and nobody benefits from reading any of it.
I really don't know of any comparable tools that are on par with Cappuccino. There's SproutCore, but at least last time I checked, it seemed to be the lesser in every way except not being dependent on that beast called Objective-J.
You can disagree with it, but I refuse to start any discussion with you. It's obvious from your tone and content that you don't intend to actually have a meaningful discussion.
I've recently been reinvestigating these Web app frameworks for a new project and not finding much that I loved, so I really did hope you had some useful insights. But oh well, I guess.
There are a lot that do a part of it, but none I've seen that are complete and are not plugins. And what about something that comes anywhere near atlas/interface builder+nib2cib?
I'm genuinely interested. Now, I need a backup plan in case atlas never comes out alive. :)
I didn't know of any but I haven't searched extensively (I was keeping it in mind for a future project). I just know that people on HN had given it universal praise, and HN can be a tough crowd.
I'm all in favor of a diversity of awesome development tools. Even though I use Ruby, I would be sad if Python went away. I use Lisp, but I would be sad if Haskell went away. I use emacs but would be sad if vim went away.
I'm dying to see that list of yours. I hadn't heard of noloh before but thank you for bringing it to my attention. Just remember, if you want your dev tools to be successful, you need to get people talking about them. Best of luck!
No offense dude, but I've tried using both noloh and Atlas, and you really can't compare the two.
Furthermore, I don't recall ever interacting with you in our IRC room, or through support, thus I'm a little suspect as to your development claim, I also don't see you as ever signing up for a sandbox or a download.
NOLOH has received significant praise from developers, and non-developers alike. We've had people with no programming background create complex applications with little help.
In any event, nowhere in my post was I promoting NOLOH, I was simply suggesting that there are in fact other tools, aside from NOLOH, that are pretty awesome. As a developer of one, we make it our business to see what else is out there.
[Edited] Removed Unnecessary Paragraph
As an example, I've been using Microsoft technology for the better part of 20 years now, and I've never sent them an email. I'm sure there are chat rooms for their stuff, but honestly I can't come up with a reason why any grownup would ever enter one.
My suspicion is that the developers you see on the support forums are not the best ones. The ones that simply get it immediately and start running are the ones you'll never hear from.
could you point out when this was suggested?
I don't get it: what could they do with them? 280North's main product is Atlas, a development platform that creates applications that run on Motorola's Droids, but on an OS that's not developed at Motorola... someone please convince me this isn't a desperate attempt for Motorola to appear somehow competitive.
But, yeah, I don't know why Motorola? It does seem desperate, but it's a good buy nonetheless cuz Capuccino is pure js (it's a superset of js after all) goodness.
Read point six in Steve's "Thoughts on Flash". Apple isn't interested in actively developing web platforms because, as Jobs said,
We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform. [...] This becomes even worse if the third party is supplying a cross platform development tool.
Apple was probably on to something, but realized that there was no money to be made. Motorola, on the other hand, wasn't making money on software anyway. So this approach could be good for them.