280North bring Keynote to the web
I’ve first seen a preview of this at the first JavaScript developer meetup in San Francisco earlier this year, but now the 280 North guys have released their very Keynote-esque presentation editor for the web.
Have a play with it and especially check the key-commands and drag and drop support. The shape designer is also pretty nifty. That said, I am on a hefty MacBook pro, so I’ll check the performance on the old work-horse Thinkpad at home later.
The most amazing thing about this is happening under the hood: the developer wrote a library that abstracts browser rendering engines using Canvas, SVG and Flash (on a per-need basis) into a unified language – Objective J which is – as the name suggests – a mapping from Objective C to JavaScript.
I tried to milk them for more information when we met briefly (yes, the guys involved did work at Apple before – obvious, isn’t it), and will try to cover this interesting concept in more detail soon on Ajaxian or YDN.
Tags: awesome, canvas, flash, keynote, north280, presentations, showcase, svg
June 5th, 2008 at 7:41 pm
Hey Chris,
Sounds awesome. However, your link is wrong. I think that it needs to point to http://280slides.com/editor.
Cheers
June 5th, 2008 at 7:42 pm
Never mind, it redirects. It’s weird, when you posted that link on Twitter, it didn’t work.
Oh, well.
June 5th, 2008 at 11:30 pm
wow. slick.
June 5th, 2008 at 11:47 pm
That was awesome to play with! Only thing needed were some transitions. but the rest was easy as cake.
June 5th, 2008 at 11:54 pm
I’m just trying to work out the title of your blog.
Does the “till” refer to something about cash registers? Is it an unintentional misspelling of “’til”? Is it an intentional misspelling of “’til”? If it is an intentional misspelling, why?
June 6th, 2008 at 2:48 am
This is pretty cool. There is another, Flex based tool that is similar called SlideRocket (SlideRocket.com). Check it out.
June 6th, 2008 at 7:17 am
@Bucky: You’re wrong. Here’s what Apple Dictionary has to say about the word.
USAGE NOTE
Till is, like until, a bona fide preposition and conjunction. Though less formal than until, till is neither colloquial nor substandard. As Anthony Burgess put it, âIn nonpoetic English we use âtillâ and âuntilâ indifferently.â ( A Mouthful of Air; 1992.) It’s especially common in British Englishâe.g.:
âAfter the First World War, Hatay, named by Attaturk after the Hittites, fell into the hands of the French, who did not return it till 1939.â ( Independent [UK]; Apr. 1, 1995.)
âHe works from dawn till dusk, six days a week.â ( Daily Telegraph [UK]; Mar. 31, 1997.)
And it still occurs in American Englishâe.g.: âIn medium skillet, sauté the garlic till golden. Add onion, wait till brown.â ( Palm Beach Post; Mar. 23, 1995.)
But the myth of the word’s low standing persists. Some writers and editors mistakenly think that till deserves a bracketed sic âe.g.: â âTrading in cotton futures was not practiced till [sic] after the close of the Civil War, spot cotton being quoted like other stocks in cents, halves, quarters, etc.â â ( School Science and Mathematics; Apr. 1, 1997 [in which the sic appeared in the original source being quoted].)
If a form deserves a sic, it’s the incorrect ’til. Worse yet is ’till, which is abominableâe.g.: âA month or two remain ’till [read till ] you grab your dancing shoes, plus a crew of pals or that special date.â ( Denver Post; Mar. 21, 1997.) â BG
June 6th, 2008 at 8:33 am
Bucky (?), what Rafe says, it is a short version of either “Wait until I dotcom” or “Wait until I come”, I was working for a big .com when I started blogging :)
June 6th, 2008 at 6:53 pm
It works suprisingly well on my super hefty eMac 1ghz. Seems like some pretty amazing technology behind the scenes. I’d love to see some more :-)
June 10th, 2008 at 5:03 pm
Really nifty! I had no problem running â280Slidesâ on my faithful Dual 1.42 GHz PowerPC G4.
June 10th, 2008 at 5:26 pm
A minor quibble: the application wonât let you insert any diacritical mark unless it is directly available from the keyboardâfor example, I have a French keyboard and therefore I can insert only the following letters: é, è, ç, à , ù. Mac OS X character palette insert feature doesn’t work (!?) However copy-and-paste is an acceptable workaround.