Back when the iPhone first launched and the App Store was still a twinkle in Apple’s eye, the only way to get your goods onto the platform was to develop them as an iPhone-optimized web page – otherwise known as an iPhone Web App. Unable to make use of much of iPhone’s functionality (like the GPS, camera, etc.), Web Apps were quickly considered the inferior option when Apple unshackled the iPhone SDK, opening the doors for the standalone Objective-C apps which have since flooded through the App Store. It was great news for Objective-C developers and consumers looking for rich applications – but not so much for those who’d grown accustomed to developing for the web.
At the recent Future of Web Apps conference in Miami, Y-Combinator-backed 280 North announced Atlas, a drag-and-drop visual editor for building desktop web applications with Cappuccino, 280 North’s Javascript-based framework. Near the tail end of the presentation, 280 North co-founder Francisco Tolmasky gave the audience a sneak peek of one of Atlas’ best features: iPhone support. The real trick? Atlas can wrap up iPhone Web Apps like native applications, granting them access to a significant portion of the iPhone API and allowing them to be sold through the App Store.
This lowers the barrier of entry for iPhone development substantially, allowing those with Javascript knowledge to create fully functional applications on the platform without requiring them to learn a whole new language. The same limitations that apply to Javascript apply here, presumably – in other words, don’t expect to be throwing down ultra-rich OpenGL-based 3D games, but mid-range apps (such as Twitter clients, RSS readers, etc.) should be completely doable.
How the API-related stuff works is still a bit of a mystery. 280 North is keeping mum on their methods for the time being – not only for the sake of maximum impact when Atlas launches in the coming months, but also because they’re still determining which of a handful of approaches will work best. I’d assumed that Atlas compiled the user’s code within a wrapper which served as a middle man, passing API calls to the iPhone and returning the results, but a quick chat with Tolmasky indicated that this wasn’t necessarily the case.
If it works as demonstrated, it’s a wonderful idea. We’ll have to keep an eye on this one.
sound great. Note that http://www.phonegap.com already provides a similar solution, but with regular dashcode or javascript. Came out at iPhone Dev camp last year.
There was a similar technology profiled on Webmonkey a while back called Phone Gap. A quick peek at its page looks like they also support Android and Blackberry: http://phonegap.com/
I would love to build iPhone apps using web technology. Does anyone know if Apple imposes any limitations on these sorts of frameworks? Do they have any prejudice against publishing Atlas/Phone Gap-derived apps?
I know the guys at http://www.motherapp.com launched something similar last year. They can generate native iPhone apps with plan HTML. Also generating native apps for windows mobile and blackberry.
check them out at web2expo san francisco.
There are already 4 apps in the appstore using PhoneGap, and I know of at least 5 more that are on the way right now. http://phonegap.com/projects
At least with PhoneGap apple hasn’t shown any prejudice (or knowledge for that matter) concerning this approach to apps.
PhoneGap has been powering apps in the AppStore since October 2008, so Atlas seems a bit behind the times perhaps. But I’d welcome any additional approaches available for developers!
PhoneGap gives you some access to the iPhone native features (though not everything), but that’s it. You still need to deal with the entire application on your own. Building with Atlas will give you the power of Cappuccino as well, and should let you build better apps faster.
That was cool! It’s like Interface Builder for the web.
Yes, and like X-code :)
pretty neat…very exciting..great job team 280 north!! btw…love the name :-)
pretty neat…very exciting…great job team 280 north. btw…love the name…
I was at FOWA Miami when Francisco gave his presentation. When he created and ran his app (both web and iPhone) using nothing but drag-and-drop, there were plenty of jaws on the floor. It was easily one of the highlights of the conference, and seemed to impress everyone I talked to. I’m looking forward to playing with Atlas when its out.
Yeah very nice
This stuff is coming to Silverlight in a big way. Except you get to write once and automatically work with: dekstop, web and mobile.
Furthermore, you get to “leverage” Microsoft’s: data centers, search Live services, data services, BI/collaboration services, SkyDrive storage, Mesh sync services etc. Even though Microsoft has a way to catch up to Google in this space.
Microsoft has the Silverlight UI, the data services, the web presence that not many other companies can put together. This applies to Adobe Flash/Flex as well (which is a superior vanilla RIA, but what does it integrate with???).
I don’t see how there will be competition here IF (big IF) Microsoft does it right.
Well MS might indeed create a good platform and tools but unfortunately for them a lot has changed in the programming and development world. It’s not the 90’s anymore. The younger crowd (unfortunately I’m not part of it anymore) will never touch any of that stuff. It’s all about these new javascript based tools (ajax, sproutcore, this Atlas product) and Adobe Flash for web AND mobile or RIA’s. The Android platform is too small to even be mentioned. The develop once and deploy everywhere is the future for sure, it’s just that microsoft won’t play much part in it.
280 North does some pretty amazing stuff and I can’t wait to see what some intelligent developers are going to be able to do with cappuccino.
Another note, the “Open Source” book that they are making sounds pretty cool, but in essence isn’t it just a published wiki?
Forgive my ignorance but at the beginning of the article it state that a drawback of regular Web apps was that they were “Unable to make use of much of iPhone’s functionality (like the GPS, camera, etc.)” and it kinda sounded like Atlas/Cappuccino was an answer to this.
Later it states: “The same limitations that apply to Javascript apply here, presumably – in other words, don’t expect to be throwing down ultra-rich OpenGL-based 3D games…”.
So… what about the GPS & camera functionality? They load up an image picker or something in the video but a quick search through Cappuccino’s api docs shows no mention of either GPS or camera – much of the talk about native functionality seems (intentionally?) ambiguous.