8th
280slides
280slides is a presentation app written in a new Web framework called Objective-J, which is a port of the Cocoa APIs to JavaScript along with an Objective-C-like syntax. There’s an interview with the developers here, but it’s audio and frankly not that enlightening: for example, they respond to questions about implementation detail with “that’s all just implementation detail” and “we use the technology available”. Probably the most interesting part is that the developers consider using Objective-J to be working at a higher level than using other Web frameworks. While other frameworks try to co-exist with each other, Objective-J assumes it owns the DOM, intercepts all events (to support its own event mechanism), etc etc. As a result, the app doesn’t look like a Web app. It reminds of Java’s Swing, at least in the early days, where Swing apps looked obviously different to native apps, usually worse, and all your keyboard shortcuts wouldn’t work because the Swing guys decided that being cross-platform was more important than being usable on any particular platform. Oh yeah, and you couldn’t use any of the standard system dialogs (such as a file selector) because Swing had its own, nastier, one. Gah. Bad memories.
Even so, 280slides is a pretty fantastic program. It looks great and feels very much like a desktop app. Maybe not looking (or behaving) like a Web app isn’t such a huge deal when most Web apps look terrible.