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.

We’re really excited to announce the next major release of Cappuccino, Version 0.9. This massive release includes several killer new components, exciting new features for existing components, and of course a number of bug fixes. Here’s a brief overview of some of the compelling things you’ll find in Cappuccino 0.9:

Bindings

One of the most exciting features of this release is full Key Value Bindings support. Team members Klaas Pieter, Alexander, Ross, and of course many members of the community have put a tremendous amount of work into getting bindings ready for this release. With support for most major components, CPObjectController, CPArrayController, and undo/redo, bindings are already a killer feature. But we’ve gone one step beyond that and included support for bindings in nib2cib! So not only can you build your Cappuccino interface in Interface Builder, but you can now configure interface bindings in it as well.

CPTableView and CPOutlineView

We were incredibly excited to introduce table views—one of the most important and versatile components in any widget set—in our 0.8 release. In 0.9, we’ve matured the table view to production quality and added its supplemental component, the outline view. CPOutlineView lets you build tables that provide hierarchical data and it inherits from CPTableView, so it already benefits from all the additional work that has gone into the table view.

CPOutlineView

Table views now support bindings, group rows, inline editing, column reordering and resizing, and a whole slew of other features. Perhaps the most requested feature that is now supported: variable row heights.

One of the most important aspects of our table view is performance; we have been very careful not to sacrifice speed for any of these new features. CPTableView will still scroll like butter, even with hundreds of thousands of rows.

New Components

This release also introduces several new features to Cappuccino. You’ll find more controls from Cocoa and some new additions specific to Cappuccino. While there are too many to mention them all here, here are some notable additions:

• CPAlert: Totally rewritten for ease of use and featuring a new UI  designed by Sofa.
• CPBrowser: We’re shipping a great implementation of CPBrowser with this release of Cappuccino. CPBrowser provides columnar layout for displaying hierarchical data. This is very similar to the column view in Mac OS X’s Finder.
• CPCursor: A simple API for changing the user’s cursor. The class supports a number of cursors from the start or allows you to load your own images.
• CPPredicate: The CPPredicate school of classes gives you a very powerful way to filter through your data. A future release may include robust controls for users to visually edit predicates.
• CPStepper: A control that allows users to incrementally step through values.
• CPTokenField: A powerful text field subclass with support for autocomplete, CPTokenField allows you to build unique token managers, like the address fields in Mac OS X’s Mail.app.
• NativeHost: We announced NativeHost a few months ago, but this is the first time we’ve included it with a release of Cappuccino. NativeHost lets you build your Cappuccino application for desktop platforms and distribute it like any other desktop app. Support for Mac OS X is currently included, with Windows and Linux support coming soon.

The Future

We’re extremely proud of this release and all the time and work that has gone into it. We couldn’t have made it to this point this without all our contributors (67 and counting!), and a huge thank you goes out to everyone involved. The core team has grown considerably as well, now composed of 7 team members. We also want to thank everyone who has battle hardened this release through rigorous testing and feedback.

But what’s next? We have a ton of updates in the pipeline, and the master branch is already far ahead of 0.9. Cappuccino has been open source for over 2 years now, and it has been an amazing ride. The framework has vastly matured and a lot of people would have already slapped the 1.0 sticker on it. However, we’ve had a concrete goal of quality and completion in mind from the beginning, and can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel. Stay tuned in the upcoming weeks as we discuss our final roadmap toward Cappuccino 1.0!

-Randy

You can find a full list of changes here.

Yesterday Google announced their revolutionary web store. We’re super excited about this and thrilled that there are already eight Cappuccino apps on the web store today.

We’re really proud of these applications built with Cappuccino.
If we’ve missed any, please leave us a comment and we’ll be sure to add it!

PicsEngine: Organize your photo library on the web from anywhere.
PicsEngine is an easy way to manage your photos online. It offers unlimited space storage and an easy-to-use interface to organize and access your photos wherever you are.

Mockingbird: Collaborative wireframing tool that lets you make and share mockups of your site or application quickly and easily. Indispensable for designers, developers, or anyone else who needs to build a website and wants to plan it first.

Almost.at: Follow people at real-world events in real-time with this mashup of posts, images, videos, and links from sites like Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube.

Issues: A front end to GitHub’s issues tracker written in Cappuccino focused on providing a true desktop application like experience to manage multiple repositories.

280Slides: Presentation tool that makes it easy to create and share beautiful presentations.

TimeTable: Time tracking application for freelancers to keep track of projects, work time, expenses, and clients. Complete with in-app calling, directions, and invoice generation, and more.

ThatMusicApp: Create libraries from your favorite internet videos. It’s completely free so everybody in the world can use it.

Spanning Backup: Highest-rated Google Apps backup solution, Spanning Backup continually backs up Google Calendar, Contacts, and Docs to the cloud to make sure your most important data is never lost.

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!

Three months ago we were thrilled to announce the introduction of our front end to GitHub Issues. Since then we have worked on specific bugs in the applications and added small features here and there.

Today we are excited to announce the first major revision to our GitHub Issues! Below is a list of all the new features Nick Small and Randy Luecke have worked hard to introduce.

• Editable Issues
• Swap orientation button in the browser version
• Additional keyboard shortcuts
• Additional columns with the ability to show and hide them by right clicking the table header
• Additional search filters
• Additional improvements for keyboard
• Support for previewing issues before you submit them
• Bulk operations on multiple issues at once
• Notifications for unsaved comments and issues
• OAuth
• Full support for tagging

…and of course various bug fixes!

You can view the application by visiting githubissues.heroku.com, or you can download the updated desktop version (read more about how we make this work with NativeHost).

In addition to this new version of the application Randy has worked hard on a browser extension to automatically convert GitHub URLs to use our Cappuccino app.

You can customize it to do any of the following:

• Automatically redirect you from GitHub.com issues to our application
• Prompt you each time you enter an issues page to redirect you to our application
• Click the button in the toolbar to redirect you to our application.

If you are looking at a GitHub repository and click the button in the toolbar you will be redirected to that repository’s issues. If you’re not viewing a repository and click the button in the toolbar you will be redirected to the Issues application where you can select a repository and issue from there.

This plugin has been open source and is available on GitHub, but if you just want to install it you can download it here.

We hope you are as excited about this revision as we are, and we hope this update will make our application even more useful to you!