Back when the iPhone first launched and the App Store was still a twinkle in Apple’s eye, the only way to get your goods onto the platform was to develop them as an iPhone-optimized web page – otherwise known as an iPhone Web App. Unable to make use of much of iPhone’s functionality (like the GPS, camera, etc.), Web Apps were quickly considered the inferior option when Apple unshackled the iPhone SDK, opening the doors for the standalone Objective-C apps which have since flooded through the App Store. It was great news for Objective-C developers and consumers looking for rich applications – but not so much for those who’d grown accustomed to developing for the web.

At the recent Future of Web Apps conference in Miami, Y-Combinator-backed 280 North announced Atlas, a drag-and-drop visual editor for building desktop web applications with Cappuccino, 280 North’s Javascript-based framework. Near the tail end of the presentation, 280 North co-founder Francisco Tolmasky gave the audience a sneak peek of one of Atlas’ best features: iPhone support. The real trick? Atlas can wrap up iPhone Web Apps like native applications, granting them access to a significant portion of the iPhone API and allowing them to be sold through the App Store.

This lowers the barrier of entry for iPhone development substantially, allowing those with Javascript knowledge to create fully functional applications on the platform without requiring them to learn a whole new language. The same limitations that apply to Javascript apply here, presumably – in other words, don’t expect to be throwing down ultra-rich OpenGL-based 3D games, but mid-range apps (such as Twitter clients, RSS readers, etc.) should be completely doable.

How the API-related stuff works is still a bit of a mystery. 280 North is keeping mum on their methods for the time being – not only for the sake of maximum impact when Atlas launches in the coming months, but also because they’re still determining which of a handful of approaches will work best. I’d assumed that Atlas compiled the user’s code within a wrapper which served as a middle man, passing API calls to the iPhone and returning the results, but a quick chat with Tolmasky indicated that this wasn’t necessarily the case.

If it works as demonstrated, it’s a wonderful idea. We’ll have to keep an eye on this one.

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280 North, the Y Combinator-backed startup that brought you slideshow maker 280 Slides, has released a programming language and set of frameworks collectively known as Cappuccino that can be used to create rich web applications in the same way you’d create desktop applications for MacOS X.

Like SproutCore, which powers Apple’s MobileMe, Cappuccino seeks to replicate the functionality of Cocoa, a native application programming environment for MacOS X. But unlike SproutCore, Cappuccino doesn’t expect its developers to know any HTML, CSS, and JavaScript – the languages used traditionally for standards-based web development.

Rather, Cappuccino implements a language called Objective-J that mimics the Objective-C language used by Cocoa developers. While this poses a learning curve for many existing web developers, it eases the transition to the web for many desktop developers. There are other advantages to basing things in Objective-J as well: advancements in the Cappuccino frameworks don’t wait for the slow emergence of new standards, developers only deal with one language, and Cappuccino comes with useful language features simply not available in JavaScript.

Ultimately, Cappuccino intends to facilitate and speed up the development of rich web applications – ones that look and feel like desktop applications. For example, it helps with creating apps that have drag ‘n drop, copy and paste, undo and redo, and document saving functionality. If you can do something with Cocoa when developing for MacOS X, you can probably do it with Cappuccino as well.

Cappuccino is being provided as open source software under the lesser general public license. The 280 North team intends to spend more of its time on Cappuccino rather than 280 Slides going forward, although it does plan to continue releasing updates to that product. You can read more about 280 North and how Cappuccino compares to SproutCore in this Ars Technica interview from June.

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What happens when two former Apple employees – one from the iPhone team and one from the iTunes Store team – go off and start their own Y Combinator-backed startup? Apparently they come up with an online slideshow tool that looks highly reminiscent of Keynote.

280 North first presented 280 Slides (now available in public beta) earlier this Spring at YC’s biannual demo day. In their presentation, the three founders emphasized two reasons why 280 Slides would take off when other browser-based PowerPoint clones had failed.

First, 280 North has been designed to make users forget that they aren’t using a desktop application. And they do a good job sustaining that illusion, even though the application is based in JavaScript not Flash. 280 North has actually built out an entire JavaScript framework called Cappuccino that it plans to release as open source soon. Competitors who are also trying to recreate the desktop experience in the browser, such as Empressr and SlideRocket, have been built in Flash (and Flex in particular).

Secondly, 280 North touts how easy it is to download your slideshows in PowerPoint format. They figure that most people shy away from using online tools because ultimately they need to share their slideshows with friends. While Google Docs can also export to PowerPoint, 280 Slides puts this functionality front and center.

Overall, this is a simple application that has been designed to work and work right. You won’t find a lot of advanced features related to charts, styling, effects or collaboration, but fundamental stuff like keyboard strokes work just the way it should. Among the features 280 Slides does boast is the ability to publish on SlideShare, grab color combos from Adobe Kuler, add videos and photos from the likes of YouTube and Flickr, and embed on other sites.

It would be good to see auto-saves (my Safari crashed once, causing me to back up a bit – this is beta after all). More themes and controls over default settings (the default font, in particular) would be welcome, too. But overall, 280 Slides does enough to appeal to basic users, and it certainly presents the most intuitive user interface of them all.

Sample slideshow after the jump – it may break on Firefox 2…

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The fledgling startups listed below will present their ideas and initial products to investors at this spring’s Y Combinator Demo Day on March 18. Of the 19 companies in this batch, 10 have already launched and only one remains in stealth mode. Most of them have been in development for only three months.

Chatterous

Chatterous connects various forms of communication so that people can message each other regardless of the form they use most. Currently the service ties SMS, email, IM, and web together so that messages sent using one technology will be received by others using any of the other technologies. This works by setting up a group on Chatterous’s website and putting down all the ways your friends can be contacted. You can then start sending messages to them immediately, meaning that they don’t even have to change their own behavior all that much. Chatterous launched in public beta last week.

Addmired

Addmired provides the AddHer and AddHim social network widgets, both of which display two user profile pictures at a time and ask users to answer certain questions about them, such as “Who’s more popular?” The founders argue that their widgets are more appealing to social network owners than other widgets, because they help drive traffic within the social networks, not siphon traffic out of them. They look to establish service level agreements with some of the smaller social networks. We covered the service in February here.

Snaptalent

Snaptalent is an advertising network for job listings that uses IP detection to determine whether website viewers work or study at particular companies or institutions. It then displays listings from employers who want to attract workers from organizations known for their talent, such as Facebook or Harvard. See our review of the service from this week here.

RescueTime

RescueTime helps individuals and businesses track how they spend their time at the computer, and consequently, find ways to become more productive. The web-based dashboard charts application and website usage over long periods of time and shows you whether you’ve been reaching your goals. So far, 278 businesses have signed up for RescueTime for a total of 26,132 seats. See our review from last May here.

MightyQuiz

MightyQuiz is a user generated quiz destination and widget provider that we covered recently. Users are encouraged to answer trivia questions from a wide range of categories. They can also submit their own questions and embed them on their sites. The site is very sticky: the average session lasts 8 minutes (or 19 questions). As a comparison, the founders claim that Slate has an average session length of 4:22 and Wired has 3:34.

Tipjoy

Tipjoy is an easy micropayment system for the web. It has been designed to cut out the steps necessary for website visitors to leave small amounts of money for content publishers, such as bloggers. The Tipjoy button placed on a website asks for only an email address and by default registers a donation of 10 cents. The service is nearing 70,000 impressions per day and the founders are exploring different models for micropayments, such as employing them to finance high definition video on the web. We wrote about Tipjoy here.

8aWeek

8aweek promises to save you hours of time wasted each week on time-drain websites like Facebook and Drudge Report. The 8aweek browser toolbar will track your website usage, remind you of how much permitted time you have left on each restricted site, and even block you from particular sites once you’ve spent too much time on them. See our review from February here.

WebMynd

WebMynd provides a visual interface for reviewing your browsing history. The founders draw comparisons to Gmail – just as Gmail obviated the need to sort messages into folders by providing effective search and tagging, WebMynd renders it unnecessary to manually bookmark sites and organized them into folders because it’s easy to search and visually flip through the pages you’ve visited. WebMynd operates as a Firefox toolbar and has already indexed 8M page impressions. We wrote about them in January.

BaseShield

BaseShield will protect Windows PCs from malicious viruses and attacks by leveraging virtualization software. Its methods improve on existing anti-virus solutions by preventing all types of attacks, not just the recognized and documented ones. The service has yet to launch.

Insoshi

Insoshi is an upcoming white label social networking platform. It will differentiate itself from many of the other social networking platforms by taking a completely open source approach (think: WordPress of social networks). The software has yet to be released.

Mixwit

Mixwit describes itself as a combination of Slide and iTunes. While it has more ambitious long-term plans, it currently provides an easy way to make sharable mix tapes with songs found through the MP3 search engine Seeqpod.

Omnisio

Omnisio will help you annotate and share videos from any website. It will also add structure to the existing video content on the web. The service has yet to launch.

Deluux

Deluux aims to become a distributed Facebook, or an inverted Ning, by relocating the center of people’s online identities to their websites, which exist outside of any one social network. The service will facilitate the distribution of personalized content around the web and help drive traffic to these personal websites. It has yet to launch.

Wundrbar

Wundrbar wants to improve upon the search bar experience by providing users with powerful inline commands. The idea is reminiscent of YubNub but Wundrbar strives to appeal to a larger audience and to incorporate functionality that helps people manage their personal online accounts in addition to searching the web.

YumDots

YumDots wants to be the go-to mobile application for finding places to eat when out on the town. Its emphasis on using interactive maps to display information about local restaurants makes it more efficient than other mobile review services like Yelp’s. The service has yet to launch.

280 North

280 North will debut with a web-based PowerPoint clone called “280 Slides” that strives to mimic the desktop experience and features the ability to export presentations to PowerPoint format. The founders’ longer term goals consist of providing a JavaScript-based development framework for building desktop-like applications for the web. None of these services, however, have been launched yet.

Kirkland North
Kirkland North wants to take an infectious campus-wide game popular at Yale and Harvard last year and spread it to other campuses around the country. The Risk-like game pits sections of campuses against each other in a virtual battle for university-wide domination. While the founders have plans to roll out an integrated solution that can serve many institutions at once, they are currently rolling out individual versions of their online service, such as one for Stanford that launched only two weeks ago and already involves 20% of the campus.

Joberator
Joberator will help employers find developer talent by encouraging computer science students to refer their developer friends, of whom they have more intimate knowledge than any professional recruiter. Incentives for personal referrals are created by employers who list the bonuses they will pay to pay those who recommend candidates eventually hired. The service has yet to launch.

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