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Comment by asnyder | Hacker News Reader

There are plenty of other awesome tools out there. The valley has a tendency to idolize certain people unnecessarily, this leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy.

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.

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to suggest that they're the only ones building awesome tools

could you point out when this was suggested?

There are plenty of other awesome tools out there. The valley has a tendency to idolize certain people unnecessarily, this leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy.

No offense dude, but I've tried using both noloh and Atlas, and you really can't compare the two.

Correct, you can't compare the two. NOLOH is a development platform, Atlas is an IDE. If you're comparing NOLOH to Cappuccino, that's a different story.

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

Sorry, didn't mean that as criticism. I just meant you can't really compare the two products/audiences/business models/etc, because they're different (Atlas never targeted "people with no programming background creating complex applications", they targeted Objectie-C developers). NOLOH is awesome, but in a different way than Atlas was.

Coming from someone who knows absolutely zero on NOLOH, do yourself a favor and change the name. It's horrible. Unreadable, loud, unprounouncable nerd-cronym that doesn't make me care to know what your product is. Just my two cents.

Out of curiosity, why would you expect to know whether a given developer was using your technology using the criteria you list?

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.

"There are other cool development tools" is a pretty empty statement. Not only is it completely subjective, but it doesn't even make a subjective claim that has any bearing on anything. So what if there are other tools you personally feel are cool? What does that imply for Cappucino developers?

My interpretation of the original poster's comment was that they were suggesting that it was a shame that 280North was bought, rather than becoming profitable, thus possibly ending the development of a cool development tool.

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.

I think that's one of the reasons why VC (from a good 'name') is useful, it gets you press, lots of it. Instantly you're news worthy because the press somehow sees you as 'validated', which means they're no longer going out on a limb in writing about you, everybody will be writing about you so they can't be seen as missing the boat.

Don't underestimate this effect.

If there are many superior tools that don't get the attention they deserve, it doesn't help the situation to hide them behind vague terms like "cool development tools."

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.

There are numerous tools that are on par with Cappuccino in terms of functionality. However, I don't want to create a never ending discussion thread on the new HN, I don't have enough karma or patience to deal with it. I was simply stating a point.

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.

It's not that I disagree with you. It's that you haven't said anything of substance, and I hoped you would. Your comments have merely been dismissive (first toward Cappuccino and now toward me personally). I always appreciate helpful comments even if I disagree with them.

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.

Very well, I'll create a list later tonight listing the most notable ones, along with their features and benefits. I'm sorry for misinterpreting your response.

List and details are getting pretty long. Seems that I should turn this into a blog post. I'm pretty exhausted so won't be able to finish it tonight. I'll make sure to post before the week is up.

I'm really interested to know some names. I haven't seen anything that allows you to abstract completely away from this multiple language/multiple framework nonsense that web development is mostly (at the most basic level, having to deal with html+css+javascript+frameworks).

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 am working on JaxScript, which will be the first XML-based abstraction framework for HTML/CSS/JS/DOM. First tech preview version within about a month. http://www.jaxscript.com

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

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!

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