Atlas is awesome, but...

I guess everyone who saw Atlas were astonished by how far Webdevelopment has come. Indeed, I’ve been amazed by it too. While Atlas by 280 North rebuilds the Interface Builder well known to every OS X developer, their Cappuccino and Objective-J bring a Cocoa and an Objective-C like library and language to the browser. Noteworthy is that they claim it works the same across all major browsers.

If we look at their flagship example: 280 Slides we get a feeling for this very nifty framework. And while we are used to loading screens from flash-applications I’m not a big fan of those in general and I’m not convinced that this is where the website based internet is heading.

Therefore I think that the impact of 280 North technologies will have a medium impact on the web. While we will see a few rss-readers, as everyone is playing with the demo of Atlas, I’m not convinced we will see many other websites using their technology.

Atlas, Cappuccino and Objective-J allow it to create easy cross platform applications with a common look. And this is where I see a lot of interesting stuff to happen. Platforms like Adobe AIR make a great host for applications using the named technologies.

Developer on the OS X platform will find it easy, as the tools take their inspiration from the development environment available on OS X. Especially those who had no exposure to JavaScript but did their fair share with Objective-C will love Objective-J. This might be a downturn from some; not everyone likes Objective-C or the inspired syntax of Objective-J. To build the rss-reader in the demo, no code was required. But this will change if you want to build advanced functionality into your application.