280 Slides Interview

I got a nice chance on IRC to interview Tom Robinson, one of the coders of 280 Slides, the online version of Keynote written in Objective-J, an Objective-C port in JavaScript. Cappuccino is the name of the ports of the Cocoa classes (nice choice for a name, in my opinion). Here's the interview. A podcast with another interview is available on Ajaxian.

Q: How'd you get started with the Cappuccino project?

A: We started it in college?

Q: When was that?

A: About 3 years ago.

Q: The Objective-J website currently says "coming soon." How soon is soon?

A: We're not exactly sure when "soon" will be but hopefully in the next month or two.

Q: Did you copy/paste real Keynote code or did you make it up and got it just like Keynote?

A: We wrote all the code ourselves.

Q: How'd you get the interface elements?

A: We hired a graphics designer, and did a lot of it ourselves, and purchased some of the icons.

Q: What about the interface controls? Did you write an NSButton class, NSToolbar class, etc?

A: Oh, yeah, those are all in AppKit.j, er, .sj

Q: Why .sj? Why not just .j?

A: If you look closely there's two different formats; .sj is sort of an archive of preprocessed code.

Q: Oh, and what sort of licensing are you shooting for?

A: We currently plan to make it open source. We haven't decided on a license, but we're looking for input from the community. We're considering the GPL, apache, BSD, etc.

R: I recommend the GNU Affero General Public License, especially since the code is very network-related.

As a final wrap-up, congrats and kudos to the Cappucino/Objective-J/280 Slides team! Good luck on your efforts; keep it up!