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Comment by saikat | Hacker News Reader

Hey guys, Saikat from Mockingbird here - I'd be happy to answer any questions you might have about our operation transformation framework or about our launch.

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Cool. I'm more interested in the fact that you built a large webapp using Cappuccino. I'm a beta member myself to the Atlas project, but I find its lack of updates troublesome.

Can you give us a sense about your work environment (IDEs, etc) and how you go about debugging Cappuccino apps? Do you even use Atlas? Any tips for a noob Cappuccino dev?

Thanks and nice work!

Sure. The majority of Mockingbird wasn't written using Atlas (we started on it a long time before Atlas existed), but we do use Atlas to make a lot of our panels (and if you use the --path flag with the flatten tool, you can load these panels up front to make the experience smoother). I've also heard good things about nib2cib in conjunction with interface builder if you're not liking Atlas.

I work entirely in emacs and use OJTest to test my code as I write it. Sheena (my co-founder) uses TextMate though, and I think that might be a better environment for someone starting out.

The best debugging trick I think I've learned is to use index-debug.html and enable objj_msgSend_decorate(objj_backtrace_decorator); (it's commented out by default). Other than that, I think I've learned to just try testing my code early and often with OJTest to catch things. I do want to try to build out better testing and debugging tools for Capp though.

In general, just ask questions on the mailing list and don't be afraid of coming into IRC. The #cappuccino IRC channel is one of the most helpful ones I've been.

As Saikat said, I use Textmate. There are decent bundles available for Objective-J/Capp. I'd also add that you should use Webkit (specifically Safari) when profiling Cappuccino apps for the best results.

Are you planning on open sourcing your OT framework? I started working on an OT implementation as a learning experience a few months ago, but eventually got caught up in other things. I would be very interested in playing with your code!

You keep doing great work with Mockingbird! However, a few things keep me in Omnigraffle for now - the biggest issues I have is the lack of free drawing tools and/or a much larger library of components, icons etc. I would also put the ability to create interactivity within a page high on my wishlist - Omnigraffle does this (albeit crudely) with the ability to hide/show layers.

What ways would you envision for interactivity in addition to separate pages?

Realistically: The ability to show or hide objects on a page. This would make creating things like tooltips, lightboxes, dialogues etc. a lot easier.

Ideally: I would like components to match their actual behaviour more closely, e.g. a tab container would actually contain views in the respective tabs that would be shown or hidden depending on the tab selected. I know this is no easy feat - I have yet to find a wireframing tool that lets you infuse interactivity as easily as one would like to, and I have been through a lot of them.

We have plans to expand the available widgets and to let you make your own.

Congratualtions. Look forward to reading the tech posts.

Have you evaluated causal trees against OT as the collaboration algorithm?

See:

bouillon.math.usu.ru/articles/ctre.pdf bouillon.math.usu.ru/articles/broth5.pdf

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