Is there a tool that picks up where 280 North's "Atlas" left off?

Question

Occasionally I go back and watch this video. And then I cry a little bit because 280 North got swallowed up by Motorola and to this day no one really knows exactly what became of them.

I know that there was something called "Greenhouse" for SproutCore that purportedly did something similar. But what with SproutCore's lead developer getting hired by Facebook and SproutCore itself turning into Ember.js, I'm not really sure if Greenhouse ever made it out alive.

So -- are there any tools that pick up where Atlas left off?

Answer 1

tl;dr: There are two choices: Dashcode or Cappucino, where the GUI solution seems to be building your UI in Xcode (Interface Builder) and exporting it to Cappucino. This solution seems to be supported by the core Cappucino team. Atlas and Greenhouse are dead.

The rest of this response consists of quotes and links supporting the above conclusion.

I've got the same question and have done some research.

There are three possible frameworks where such a tool could be possible. Dashcode, Greenhouse and Atlas. Atlas is dead, Greenhouse never seemed to be more than just an experiment.

Dashcode is still being maintained. It is a really good tool, and the only platform I've found that allows building Mobile apps as well as Web Apps at the same time, from the same code base. (A lot of the mobile app builders, like titanium, phonegap, etc, seem to focus only on mobile, not building for both the desktop browser and the mobile device.)

Dashcode is being revved every time Apple releases a new version of Xcode. Further, apple is doing continuous work in this area-- for instance, the iAds Producer is really a super- souped up dashcode. Further, iBooks Author is also very much like dashcode. Both of which are specific tools for specific limited target products, but both have javascript frameworks and at least some GUI support.

Producer is really slick, though its focused on making "flash" like ads with javascript.

Dashcode has not been majorly updated for quite awhile, so it might be on the way out, but it is still a viable tool.

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The 280 North guys don't seem to work for motorola anymore (boucher at least works for stripe now) and all work on Atlas has stopped.

The "officially recommended" solution seems to be XcodeCapp Which, near as I can tell, is built into Cappuciono now. "Best of all, the new XcodeCapp application automatically creates an Xcode project out of your Cappuccino project and lets you place UI components with ease." (from over a year ago, when they could have mentioned Atlas.)

Here's some references to it, including a recent saying it had been fixed for Xcode 4.4 (which was released this summer, with 4.5 being the current release.)

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/objectivej/mRMiLTP2Yh8

Also, this next link is to a site with some great tutorials, and they assume you're using Xcode: http://www.cappuccino-project.org/learn/tutorials/advanced-hello-world-2/

Here's an older blog post about the situation: http://cappuccino.org/discuss/2011/11/16/cappuccino-0-9-5/

Which contains this in the comments: "Only the people who own the Atlas project can make any statements about it, and unfortunately we're just not those people. We're the Cappuccino core developers and we manage the open source project Cappuccino. Atlas was a commercial product created by a company that doesn't exist anymore.

That said, don't worry about it, really. The Interface Builder integration is awesome and a very complete solution. And beyond that, you can write apps perfectly fine without any GUI editor at all. Or you could even write your own editor in Cappuccino. You've got a huge amount of possibilities and power at your disposal, so go out and build a cool app."

And also: "The new way of converting xibs to cibs automatically is the shiny new XcodeCapp application which you will find in /usr/local/narwhal/packages/cappuccino/support/XcodeCapp.app. That either struck us as an intuitive and easy to find path, or we didn't have time to make an easier one. ;)"

Also, this summary by Antoine Mercadal :

"Atlas is a closed source software. It was originally built by the 280N guys, and you may or may not know the history, but the point is Atlas is more likely dead. We, the Cappuccino community, cannot do anything about it, unfortunately. Complaining about Atlas here is like complaining on the W3C website about IE: it doesn't make sense.

I personally paid for the Atlas beta, and I develop all my interfaces (about 30 big cibs) with it. I was also very disappointed by the bad health of Atlas. That's the price you have to paid for using proprietary beta software: shit happens.I spent a week rebuilding all my UI under IB. It was a pain and I drank a lot of coffee during this week, but it actually really worth it. The result is just awesome.

The support of Cappuccino by IB (with XcodeCapp) is now way beyond Atlas has never been. And the future is now guaranteed because XcodeCapp is a part of Cappuccino, nib2cib is a part of Cappuccino, both of them are Open Source, and nobody will never be able to "shut them down".

Atlas was a young product, Cappuccino was also a young product and like every community-based projects, all the actors/tools/members need to be "calibrated" and need to experiment several things. I think it's now done, and that's why we're approaching the 1.0.

This release is awesome, there are tons of fixes and new features, that is what we should talk about in this thread :)"