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!

If you haven’t been paying attention, we’re holding the first ever Cappuccino conference in just 10 days in San Francisco! Today, we sold our last tickets to the event! We do have a wait list, and we’re trying to figure out how to add more tickets for the event, so sign up to get notified when more tickets become available.

CappCon 2011 is shaping up nicely with some great speakers including legendary indie developer Wolf Rentzsch, Pete LePage from Google, Jorn van Dijk of Sofa, and of course many others.

Tickets for CappCon are now available along with more details at http://cappcon.org

Also, be sure to tell your friends in person, on Twitter, and Facebook: we want to see the whole Cappuccino community there!

See you in June!

Hey everybody,

We’re excited to announce the first ever full-blown conference dedicated
to Cappuccino: CappCon 2011.

It’ll be in San Francisco, June 11-12. That’s the weekend after WWDC,
so for those of you coming for that, be sure to extend your stay by a
few nights.

We will post more details soon, but we want to get that date out there so you don’t miss it!

It’s going to be a lot of fun.

Be sure to sign up for ticket information when it’s posted on the official website here:

http://cappcon.org

If you have any quick questions you can ping @cappuccino on Twitter, or email Paul at paul@baumgart.us. And definitely get in touch if you think your company might be interested in sponsoring the conference.

In February, we’ll be running a workshop at the Web Directions North conference in Denver. It will be a four hour workshop on getting started with Cappuccino and Objective-J.

Here’s a blurb about the workshop:

This workshop will get you started on building applications in Cappuccino and Objective-J. Attendees will not be expected to have any prior experience with these technologies, but some familiarity with JavaScript and Object Oriented concepts are recommended. By the end of the workshop you will be comfortable with Objective-J and have worked through the process of building a simple application in Cappuccino. You’ll be introduced to common patterns, the most used classes, and you’ll learn how to find new information as you need it.

If you’re interested in attending the conference, or even just the workshop, you can use this discount code: WDN09RB. This will get you $50 off, making the conference $745 before December 14th, or the standalone workshop $195.

Here’s some marketing content directly from Web Directions:

Web Directions is a highly focussed conference and workshops for web designers, developers, UX and ID designers, and other web professionals whose day to day job is building web sites and web applications. It features two dozen world class experts, with a razor sharp focus on practical techniques and technologies you can use right away to build even better sites.

http://north.webdirections.org/

Web Directions North features

• 8 half day workshops
• the brand new full day Ed Directions North, for those teaching web professionals
• a two track, two day conference, featuring over 20 sessions

If you were in London last week at the Future of Web Apps conference put on by Carsonified, you may have had the opportunity to see our very own Francisco Tolmasky talk about Objective-J, Cappuccino, and, well, the future of web apps.

Thankfully, for those of us who couldn’t make it, FOWA has put up a video of the highlights from the talk. Check it out:

You can also follow along with the slides: