I’ve been a big fan of Cappuccino since late 2009 and have written and spoken about it pretty extensively. This past July I went to sunny Tetbury, UK to record a video course entitled “Cappuccino for Cocoa Developers.” Here’s some background on how the course came into being…

In addition to being a tony little country village where Prince Charles has one of his castles, Tetbury is famous for being the home town of iDeveloperTV, a company much loved by indie Mac and iOS developers for putting on NSConference, along with the extensive library of video courses and podcasts it has produced over the years. This past Spring, Steve “Scotty” Scotty invited me to give a presentation on Cappuccino at NSConference in the UK. It was extremely well-received, so I reprised the talk at the first CappCon in San Francisco this past Summer.

My goal for both talks was to show existing Cocoa developers how they can leverage their existing skills to craft desktop-caliber web-apps. In the course of preparing for these presentations, I ended up developing a series of carefully-designed tutorial apps, designed to feel comfortable to Cocoa developers while highlighting some web-specific architectural considerations.

These tutorial applications thus formed the basis of the 4 hour course. We shot the video against a white background so that the “talking-head” video could be mixed-in with the screen capture from my laptop as you see here:

The net effect is quite like having your own personal trainer. Scotty’s role is to make sure that I highlighted the points that may not be obvious to first-time learners.

The video is delivered in high-quality, DRM-free H.264 video that you download to your machine. Sync it to your iPad if you wish, then watch it in bed before dreaming of Cappuccino. The resolution lets you clearly read the code while listening to the discussion. Work along with the same source code shown in the video, adapt it to your needs, then build something meaningful to you. Since data persistence in web-apps is a major consideration, I’ve even included the source code for a simple RESTful Web Service written in Ruby on Rails so you can see how things work end-to-end.

I’m extremely proud of the work I did in creating this course, and I think Dave at iDeveloper TV did a bang-up job with the editing. Scotty has been kind enough to release the course at the exceptional price of US $29.99 in order to put in reach of everyone. Complete details can be found here:

http://ideveloper.tv/video/cappuccinocourse.html

I hope you enjoy the course. Feedback is greatly appreciated. Hopefully, I’ll have the chance to make some additional courseware in the future.

The first ever Cappuccino conference was a massive success. CappCon 2011 had a diverse set of attendees from six different continents and included both speakers and sponsors from Pixar, Google, Sofa, Push Pop Press, Shopify, and many others. The overall theme of the conference was “Design, Develop, Distribute”; everything you need in order to build a successful app. The talks explored this theme and covered a huge breadth of knowledge, while each one explored its topic in satisfying detail. In addition, all seven members of the core team were in the same room at the same time to answer questions from the community.

Two of our favorite reactions were “this is the best conference I’ve ever been to” and “CappCon was better than WWDC.”

Announcements

Perhaps the most exciting part of the event was the amount of projects revealed and released! If you didn’t follow the event on Twitter, here is a quick overview of announcements made:

• Language.js: Objective-J author Francisco Tolmasky has open sourced his new parser generator. Language.js gives you first class error reporting as well as unprecedented speed. This new parser generator will be the basis for Objective-J 2.0, which will open many unheard-of opportunities for the language. Language.js on GitHub
• CoreText and CPTextView: Cappuccino core team member Nick Small showed off his new implementation of CoreText and CPTextView. These amazing new controls for rich text represent the first time ever we will have desktop-class rich text on the web, which also offers feature parity with Cocoa’s NSTextView. CPTextView will be available soon, but CoreText is open source now, in its own branch in Cappuccino mainline.
• Aristo 2.0: Sofa has worked hard to provide a new version of the already best-in-class Aristo theme that we have already started to implement in Cappuccino. Aristo 2.0 accomplishes some new goals, mainly to “under-promise and over-deliver,” something we’ll talk more about in the coming weeks. Preview of Aristo 2.0
• Frappuccino and RunKit: Austin Sarner and Mark Davis will be open sourcing their physics-based animation toolkit, and alternative UI framework.

The Future

Of course there were many more announcements and talks, and the videos and slides for every talk will be available in the coming weeks. The atmosphere at CappCon was infectious; people were thrilled to attend, learn, talk, and interact.

Most importantly, everyone present was a part of the future of Cappuccino. The takeaway from the event is that Cappuccino is stronger than ever, and with some incredible things in the pipeline, it’s poised to get even better.

Thanks to everyone who could attend, and we hope to see everyone again next year!

Mockingbird 1.0 was released today by the folks at Some Character, LLC. If you’ve been following the work Saikat Chakrabarti and Sheena Pakanati have been doing on Mockingbird you’ll know how much effort they’ve put into the project. The duo has spent the last year refining their already excellent beta to create the best mockup and wireframe tool on the Web.

If you’re not familiar with Mockingbird, it’s an application for building and sharing mockups and wireframes built using Cappuccino. The latest release introduces real time collaboration (built with operational transformation, the same technology used in Google Wave). It also includes support for managing your organization complete with permission control. You can try Mockingbird by visiting the demo page.

If you were a beta tester be sure to check your email for a special discount, and visit the website to sign up or if you’re a beta tester upgrade here. Be sure to also read the official announcement.

Mockingbird is an exceptional example of what Cappuccino is capable of, so congratulations again to Saikat and Sheena from the entire Cappuccino community!

Today Michael Villar has released Version 4.0 of PicsEngine, a photo management utility. Version 4.0 has been completely rewritten making use of Cappuccino for the photo administration. This beautiful new application features an entirely custom UI designed by Michael himself.

PicsEngine features a community written HTML5 drag and drop file upload, photo tagging, albums, smart albums searching, geolocation,  and a gallery with mobile versions for the iPhone, iPad, and Android browsers.

We are thrilled to share in the launch of PicsEngine 4.0; it’s truly an amazing product and we’re proud to show off what people are continuing to build with Cappuccino!

Check out PicsEngine here!

Community Highlights: Using Cappuccino to build the MemoryMiner Web Viewer

Back with a second post is John Fox, creator of MemoryMiner, a digital storytelling application for Mac OS X. John writes about the steps he took to localize his Cappuccino application, a web viewer for MemoryMiner.

The post comes complete with sample code, and its worth a read if you’re interested in localizing your own applications.

We’re starting a new series here on the Cappuccino blog, featuring interesting posts by community members. The first such post is by John Fox, creator of MemoryMiner, a digital storytelling application for Mac OS X, now with a web viewer built with Cappuccino:

• Using Cappuccino to build the MemoryMiner Web Viewer

If you’ve got an interesting blog post up your sleeves write it down and post it to CappuccinoFlow. We might feature it in Community Highlights!