Thomas Balthazar has begun a weekly series of posts describing the latest development in Cappuccino. Be sure to check it out to find out what’s going on.

I’m pleased to announce the release of the second update to Cappuccino since it was made available last month, version 0.5.5.

Even more exciting is the fact that this release includes our first user contributions. We’re glad these individuals were able to help out the project, and we hope more people continue to do so in the future. You can keep up with those contributing to Cappuccino on Github.

Version 0.5.5 includes over 60 fixes, and several key new features, including:

• New build tools, including press
• Key-Value-Observing
• CPSplitView, CPWebView, and CPDate
• Additional Editor Support
• Major performance gains

Full list of resolved bugs since 0.5.1.

Download the update directly: Starter, Tools.

It’s been an exciting first week for the Cappuccino Open Source project. We’ve gotten over 10,000 downloads of the frameworks so far and counting. We’ve already been getting bug reports, patches, and even additional documentation from the community. There’s still a tremendous amount of work left to be done and its really great to start getting help from you guys.

We’ve also been doing our best to keep up with your requests. We heard you loud and clear that you want more documentation and we are stepping it up in this regard. We’ve already posted another tutorial this week on starting to build a full scale web application using Cappuccino. If you haven’t had a chance to see it, you should check it out.  We’ll be doing several more of these in the coming weeks, so you should let us know in the comments what you’d like to see explained the most!

What’s really surprised us is the wide spectrum of people trying out Cappuccino. From seasoned JavaScript developers, to Cocoa programmers that have never tried web development before, to hackers who have done neither and just think this is a really cool idea. We’re hoping this will mean great things as far as adoption goes, but more importantly, we think this will create an influx of fresh new ideas in this space.

We also have a new release out today, 0.5.1. This includes a number of fixes that people have been requesting, as well as including updated Documentation:

• Improved handling of command keys
• Improved CPView graphics performance
• Improved TextMate mode and vim syntax highlighting
• Updated Documentation is now included in both download packages
• And much more!  See them all here