Thanks to sponsorship by Sofa there will be food!

If you can’t make it before 9:00 we’ll likely be hanging around the bar at Jillian’s after, but check @280north on Twitter for updates.

0.7 By The Numbers

As of version 0.6, Cappuccino had 9 total contributors. Version 0.7 more than triples that number with 29 total contributors. And thanks to the inspiration and hard work of Xavier Noria and José Espinal, we’ve got a slick new website that keeps up to date tallies on all of the contributors to the project. Check it out here. If you find a mistake, be sure to let us know in the comments.

This release includes over 100 bug fixes, thanks in part to all the new contributors, and to the hard work of users taking the time to file quality bug reports. If you hadn’t noticed already, we’ve moved to github’s new issue tracking for bug reports, so check out the new system, and vote on issues that are important to you.

New Look

The biggest new feature of Cappuccino is our new new theme: Aristo. Aristo is the new look and feel for Cappuccino applications. Created by the talented designers at Sofa, Aristo is designed specifically to look good in the browser, and in any browser, whether it’s Firefox, Safari, or even Internet Explorer, Mac and Windows. We’ve also open-sourced the PSD file used to create Aristo. All the controls have been updated to use the new style, and we’ve added a few new controls as well, like checkboxes, radio buttons, and segmented controls.

Theming

We didn’t just build one new look for Cappuccino, though. Instead, we built an entirely new theme engine which will let anyone create a theme for Cappuccino. All the properties of the standard controls are fully themeable in all the different “theme states” (like “pushed”, “disabled”, “normal”, etc.). In the coming months, we’ll be sharing new themes with the community, and building a site for users to post their own themes for others to download and use.

Interface Builder

Those of you who come from a Cocoa background are used to using Apple’s Interface Builder tool to layout your Cocoa applications. Thanks to a technology in 0.7 called nib2cib, you can use Interface Builder to layout Cappuccino applications too. All of the classes supported in Cappuccino 0.7 that have Cocoa analogues are included. So, you can drag checkboxes, sliders, text fields, buttons, and lots more. You can even instantiate custom top level objects, or custom view subclasses, which will be converted to the right class in Cappuccino by the nib2cib tool. Once you’re done laying out the UI of your application with Interace Builder, you can use it’s target-action and outlet technology to build up its logic as well.

nib2cib is a powerful tool that drastically reduces the amount of code you need to write to build an interface with Cappuccino. The starter package now includes both a nib/xib based application template, and a standard, code based template, so you can choose which is best for you. From the command line you can use the new capp tool to generate a nib/xib project by typing “capp gen -t NibApplication MyApp”.

The Rest

As if that wasn’t enough, there are a lot more changes. First off, improved support for debugging in Cappuccino and Objective-J, thanks to some contributions to WebKit. For more details, see Francisco’s post on the topic.

We now build on top of Rake instead of ant, which has helped us create a much better build system that can improve quickly. Objective-J has improved support for deploying code to multiple platforms, like server (e.g. rhino) and browser. And we’re including the new Narwhal JavaScript standard library in Cappuccino as an external dependency.

Narwhal is still in the early stages, but eventually it will be a set of standard JavaScript APIs that work consistently across many different JavaScript implementations, making it easy to work on any JavaScript interpreter you have available. We’ll write more about all these new features as time goes on, especially all the new tools and APIs in 0.7, so stay tuned. In the mean time, you can check out information we’ve posted to the wiki.

Thanks again to everyone who’s contributed to Cappuccino for the 0.7 release, and to everyone using Cappuccino!

- Ross

Thomas Balthazar has also recapped a lot of the information in his latest installment of This Week in Cappuccino Edge. I encourage you to check it out and let us know how 0.7 beta is shaping up!

Atlas is a visual development tool for creating web applications using the Cappuccino framework. The best way to explain Atlas is to show it:

Think Vitamin has an article discussing Atlas in more detail.

We’re really excited about the ways Atlas could change the process of developing web applications. Atlas will allow developers to worry less about boilerplate user interface and glue code, just as the Cappuccino framework gives developers many common features expected by users, letting them focus on the ones specific to their applications.

Furthermore, Atlas allows non-programmers, such as many graphic designers, to join in on the process of actually building an application, rather than just providing mockups that must then be replicated in code by a developer.

Atlas will be available this summer. Sign up for updates on 280atlas.com and we’ll let you know of the progress on Atlas.

We’ve been using Slicehost for some of our development work at 280 North and have been really pleased with the results.

During the day, if you see a few odd glitches, they are likely the result of the DNS switching over or us tweaking some of the configurations. Everything should settle down by the end of the day.

We’re extremely thankful for this support from Slicehost. If you’re in the market for a server, you should consider Slicehost.

We’re all looking forward to seeing more screencasts on the site, and if you want to contribute your own screencast, get in touch with Thomas and he’ll add it to the site. Thanks Thomas!

This week Cappuccino is the featured project on GitHub:

We’re honored! Thanks GitHub.

• New language addition to Objective-J: The @accessors keyword to eliminate the boiler plate code of writing setters and getters. Read more about it here.
• Support for more classes like CPTimer.
• Performance improvements all around, but especially in Objective-J thanks to a major rewrite of the parser.
• Improved debugging tools and a new debugging “mode”.

And much more! But despite all these additions, Cappuccino has actually gotten smaller with this release. That’s thanks to some pretty cool new compression technologies. We’d like to thank the guys over at DoJo for their outstanding work on shrinksafe, which along with a number of custom techniques on our end, have really helped this along.

You may have also heard that Coda and SubEthaEdit are now shipping with built in support for Objective-J and Cappuccino. This is really exciting, but make sure to get the latest and greatest bundles from our downloads page, available in the Frameworks and Tools package. The download also includes modules for TextMate and Vim so no need to worry if you use these editors.

However, the best part about 0.6 is that we’ve had the most contributors thus far. We’d like to thank everyone who filed bugs and helped out on the IRC channel. And of course a special thanks to everyone that submitted patches:

Rich Collins
Patrick Crosby
Jake MacMullin
Sam McDonald
Glenn Rempe
Nick Takayama

So download it, take it for a spin, and don’t forget to file bugs!