I just checked out the 280Slides.com, a YCombinator’s funded company. They are developing an online Slideshow/Powerpoint site (yes, another one). The application is pretty slick and it has the Apple’s look and feel to it (both the 2 founds were from Apple). Paul Graham used their app to create his slide at StartupSchool 2008, which at the time, took him 10 minutes to start his slides due to “technical issues”.
What really got me amazed is that they developed a JavaScript UI framework called Objective-J. Apple do a lot of their apps and gadgets in Objective-C (iPhone for one), and since the guys behind 280Slides were from Apple, probably they took the concepts from Objective C and bring it over to JavaScript. Having coded TubeCaption’s caption editor, the Captionizer, from scratch, I understand how much work it takes to do something non-trivial in JavaScript. Programming an online application is totally different than programming a simple “Ajaxy, Web2.0″ page because the amount of work involved. We have hundreds of objects potentially interact with one another and trying to compete for CPU. Without a solid foundation, the application won’t be able to bear the performance and complexity weight.
I’m pretty excited to hear that 280Slides is planning to open-source their framework (probably the Objective J) in the near future. It will be a fresh idea besides the currently established frameworks such as YUI, Ext, Prototype.
Increasingly I see the trend of JavaScript being used as the underlining cross-platform language to build other frameworks and programming languages on top of it. John Resig (from jQuery) recently ported the processing visualizing language to JavaScript. His JS implementation looks AMAZING (check out the parser’s code, what a work of art) and performance-wise the library kicks major ass. Then somebody wrote a Ruby VM in JavaScript (HotRuby) and Ruby code can get executed natively in the browser. A VM written in JavaScript? WOW! Just the thought of Rails *may* work in the browser (hopefully not IE6) makes me feel dreamy. These stuffs are truly innovative and that’s what really push the web technologies forward. And with the new JavaScript engines that promise excellent performance (Webkit’s Squirrelfish, Mozilla’s SpiderMonkey), for sure we will even see MORE of the creative innovations.
PS: don’t forget to check out www.tubecaption.com’s Captionizer, the first timeline-based caption editor.
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I just checked out TubeCaption.com and I think it is awesome! I am deaf with a cochlear implant and I could never understand videos unless they were captioned. Kudos for developing this! I would like to know if there is going to be an option to upload a .SRT file to Tubecaptions in the future. The reason why I’m asking is that I used Overstream.net to caption my cochlear implant activation video (that you can see over at my blog) and I can download the .SRT file. I really don’t want to go through the whole painstaking process of re-captioning it.