280 North (YC Winter 08) speaks at FOWA | Hacker News Reader

280 North (YC Winter 08) speaks at FOWA

cappuccino.org

23 pointsryan9 comments

280slides definitely looks sharp, but it seems to be the only application so far that's a working example of a fairly complex web app built on cappuccino. This despite the fact that in the video he claims it's pretty simple to port a mac app onto the web using this framework.

Has anyone taken a test drive of this framework yet? Know of any good apps out there besides the ones posted at http://cappuccino.org/learn/demos/?

Well I think its worth noting that the framework's only been out for about a month. Only so many people will have had time to even take a look at Cappuccino yet, much less create something new with it. Not to mention, 280 Slides is, as you said, a fairly complex app. Something of that complexity can't be put together overnight, even with Cappuccino.

I'm working on porting a desktop app over to Cappuccino. It's important to remember that Cappuccino doesn't include all of the components found in the Cocoa frameworks yet. This makes it a little hard to port an app over directly.

For example, I just spent my weekend writing a few hundred lines of tableview code, since that's one of the classes that's missing from the framework. For my app, tableviews are essential.

I wouldn't expect my port to be done before December. Moving a desktop app over to the web isn't just a matter of slapping it in a browser. Some things have to be fundamentally redesigned to fit within a browser window.

Entertaining video, but in the end, giving a few more details about Cappuccino might have been more worthwhile than the anecdotes. As it is, I only took away that yet another framework claims to solve all my problems. Not very convincing.

If you look at the title you'll see that this is actually just the "highlights" reel. The actual talk given at FOWA went much further in depth into the actual technologies. Hopefully they will put this up too.

I like the slides app, and it was a good talk, but does the world really need another web framework?

Is creating a new framework just a way to build a cool community/userbase to sell things to later?

Sure there's a lot of web frameworks and libraries out there, but not many targeted at the far right side of the web "spectrum" he showed. There's Flex and Silverlight, if you don't mind being locked into proprietary runtimes that require a plugin install. There's GWT if you want to write Java...

YC Winter 08? Starts already? So, 280 North already got accepted?

The "winter" session begins in January, thus we were in the program beginning 10 months ago.

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