280slides

My boss Thomas came home from San Francisco today where he attended the annual WWDC, Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, and he brought some interesting infos and stuff along (Snow Leopard Alpha install party, anyone?)

I haven’t had the chance to have a longer chat with him yet, but one thing he was totally awesome about was when he attended in this indie developer track the other day. I forgot what he told me it was entitled, but basically it was about a young startup company which “just” created a Powerpoint / iWork Keynote equivalent which completly runs inside your browser… you find it here:

http://www.280slides.com

Back yet?

Have you noticed the overall responsive UI? Have you seen the semi-transparent tool windows with their soft drop shadows? Have you tried to insert a shape via drag’n’drop and changed its size and form? And of course you noticed how the little preview pages on the left instantly updated when you changed somewhat in your main slide, haven’t you?

As a normal Joe you’d probably say “hey, decent application, very nice!” – as a developer of any kind you should by now just simply blown away…

A bit of explanation follows.

What you’ve just seen was a completly new web framework user interface built on top of a completly new web programming language named Objective-J built on top of plain, old Javascript 1.x. One of the founders of 280 North, Francisco Ryan Tolmasky, apparently loved his Objective-C for desktop development of Mac OS X applications so much, that he decided to create a version for any browser (the underlying Javascript can be found here for the interested).

Ok, now, nice, somebody invented a new script language on top of Javascript – now what? Shouldn’t this be painfully slow? What’s the point?

As you’ve seen it is not at all slow, I guess with Firefox 3 and newer versions of Safari / Webkit it should get even faster. And the point behind this is that if the foundation stands as-is, its just a matter of time to reproduce all the core functionalities of the Cocoa Frameworks – those programming libraries which are already used for all these fancy Mac OS X applications (not to forget the iPhone / iPod touch applications and the native Windows versions of iTunes and Safari). What if you could write a Objective-C application in the future – and with minimal changes to its rendering source code – just publish it as a web application running in everyone’s browser?!

Wow, now this is very cool…

Of course there are similar efforts of creating “rich internet applications”, most of them need some kind of browser plugin or runtime (Flash, Adobe Air, Silverlight, to name a few) and some are install-free (basically everything what Google has created, like Docs and Spreadsheets, the calendar app, GMail, …). While widgets on the former usually look very decent and maybe even adapt to your local style setting, pure web-based javascript apps often look like outlaws – or at least do not provide all the widgets you’re used to if you’re developing desktop applications. With whatever drives 280slides, we might see the best of both worlds – widgets which look and feel like the widgets in desktop applications and widgets which are completly install-free.

The guy(s) behind 280North promised to release Objective-J (and hopefully the Frameworks on top of it) soon under objective-j.org and I’m very very excited to see more of it.

One last anecdote Thomas told me today – Francisco Ryan Tolmasky was asked during the presentation of 280slides what he did before he founded his company, i.e. he was asked for his background. Imagine a young guy standing in front of the audience, probably aged under 25, answering “Well, I’ve worked for Apple on the iPhone version 1, but after that had been finished, I decided to leave the company. What was left for me there anyways, doing it again for iPhone 2 was not appealing after all…”

Oh my god.