If you’re in town for WWDC, or happen to be in San Francisco already, stop by CPCoder Night on Monday for a chance to meet 280 North, Sofa, and dozens of other Cappuccino developers. It’s taking place from 7-9PM in the Martini Lounge at Jillian’s, in the Metreon across the street from Moscone West.
Thanks to sponsorship by Sofa there will be food!
If you can’t make it before 9:00 we’ll likely be hanging around the bar at Jillian’s after, but check @280north on Twitter for updates.
Last week Francisco gave a talk about Cappuccino and Atlas at the Cocoaheads meetup in Silicon Valley. They recorded the event and posted it a few days ago, so we wanted to share it. Thanks to Scott Stevenson for setting up the event, and Intuit for hosting. Enjoy!
Just wanted to take a moment to introduce myself. My name is Nick Small and I’m the newest member of the 280 North team. I started using Objective-J and Cappuccino the day they launched, and recently, Ross, Tom, and Francisco have hired me to help maintain and update 280 Slides. I’m working on some new features and updates, and I’ll also be helping respond to feedback and email. Finally, I’ll be posting here whenever there are updates to 280 Slides.
I look forward to helping improve 280 Slides to make it greater than it already is and working with the great team at 280 North. Also, please feel free to let me know if you have any issues with anything!
We’re really excited about the ways Atlas could change the process of developing web applications. Atlas will allow developers to worry less about boilerplate user interface and glue code, just as the Cappuccino framework gives developers many common features expected by users, letting them focus on the ones specific to their applications.
Furthermore, Atlas allows non-programmers, such as many graphic designers, to join in on the process of actually building an application, rather than just providing mockups that must then be replicated in code by a developer.
Atlas will be available this summer. Sign up for updates on 280atlas.com and we’ll let you know of the progress on Atlas.
The Web Directions North conference is coming up Feburary 2 through the 5th in Denver. The conference includes some great sessions on the state of the art in AJAX, but it also includes two days of workshops, including Cappuccino Bootcamp. If you’re interested in learning more about Cappuccino, the JavaScript Web Framework we built to power 280 Slides, then you should come out to the conference!
As an added bonus, you can use the discount code WDN09RB at checkout time to save $50 off either the conference or just the workshop. This is a great chance to get hands on experience with Cappuccino straight from the developers. I’ll also be part of a JavaScript talk on Wednesday, in addition to the workshop, for those people who might want to learn more but aren’t interested in coding.
I’ll be posting a bit more info about the content of the workshop once we get closer to February. Hope to see you there!
280 Slides was featured recently on CNET, in an article by Bob Walsh, who said, “I was able to create this three-slide presentation as easily as I would in Keynote, and more easily than if I had been using PowerPoint.”
He also mentions fellow CNET blogger Matt Assay, who also wrote about using 280 Slides, calling the experience “exceptional.”
In the last month we’ve seen a few tutorials posted to YouTube, including this one:
And we’ve received a lot of feedback via e-mail, blogs, and our in application feedback system. All in all, people are very happy with 280 Slides, and we’re getting some great ideas about how to improve the application in the future! We’ll keep you updated as we continue to improve the best presentation app on the web.
Our friends at Google have listed 280 Slides as a featured project on Google Code for it’s slick integration with the YouTube API and Google AJAX Search API. 280 Slides allows you to easily add photos from the Google Image Search, and movies from YouTube to your presentations.
Try out these features if you haven’t already!
Open the 280 Slides Editor, click the “Pictures” or “Movies” button, enter a search term, and hit the “enter” or “return” key. Simply drag a picture or movie from the results listing to the slide.
To preview an image or movie, select it and click the preview button next to the search field.
We don’t want to repeat ourselves too much across this blog and our new one, but this news is too important to pass up.
Cappuccino, our web application framework built in Objective-J and modeled after Cocoa, is now available as an open source project at http://cappuccino.org!
We’re open sourcing this technology because we sincerely want to be part of a world where there are more high quality web applications like 280 Slides. We’ll be putting a lot of resources into Cappuccino in the future, and we plan to build a strong open source community around the development platform. We can’t wait to see where you take this with us.
Cappuccino is how we built 280 Slides, and it’s going to change the way people build web applications. So, head on over to cappuccino.org and get started building your own app!
Last week we launched another brand new feature: Import. Now you don’t need to start from scratch to use 280 Slides. Just import one of your existing presentations and get back to work! To get started, you can click the Import button in our Welcome screen, or in the top left of the title bar.
We support PowerPoint 2003 (PPT), PowerPoint 2007 (PPTX), and Open Document Format (ODP) files, up to a maximum size of 25MB.
You should also know, we’ve worked hard to make the transition as seamless as possible by not only importing your slides, but your masters and layouts as well, so that you can continue editing your presentation as if you’d never switched programs at all.
This has been our number one user requested feature since the day we launched, and we’re incredibly pleased to be able to provide it for you all. We’ve tested hundreds of existing presentations from around the net to offer the best experience we possibly can when working with your existing documents, but if you happen to come across one that isn’t up to your standards, send it to us at feedback@280slides.com and we’ll get right on it.
