WWDC '08: 280 North

The guys who comprise 280 North aren't actually working on any Mac applications. I tracked them down because what they are doing -- bringing the quality and usability of the Mac experience to the web -- is remarkable. Their web application, 280 Slides, turns making beautiful, web-based presentations into quick work. It's built on a platform called Cappuccino, using what they've dubbed Objective-J (named for its similarities to Objective-C) -- a library they created which provides a highly useful layer of functionality to standard javascript. According to 280 North, Objective-J provides a web development platform that is more Cocoa-like by removing a lot of the lower-level variables that are the bane of most web developers. Easy cross-browser compatibility, anyone?

2 of the three members of 280 North are former Apple employees, working on the iPhone and iTunes, respectively. They state that 280 Slides isn't so much "Apple-inspired" as it is "good-inspired," but the Keynote resemblance is hard to deny, especially in comparison to other, less-polished web-based presentation apps. 280 Slides is still a work-in-progress, but these guys are coding hard and fast to build what is going to be an excellent application. Check out the video (after the jump) and then take a peek at 280 Slides.