Weary Mappers

I have often expressed my dissatisfaction with Flash, and shown little interest in learning/evangelizing it. This has been mostly because of annoying intros written in Flash and inflicted upon us over time, but also because it is hard to give in to a technology that is controlled by one company. Nevertheless, there have been some very good examples of Flash interfaces, particularly for mapping applications.

Here is, however, a good indication of where the web is going, imo, that is.

See Cappuccino, a framework for building desktop-like applications in the web. Cappuccino is built using Obj-J, an Obj-C like variation of and built using JavaScript, so it is, in essence, pure JavaScript, standards compliant and all. [1]

See Slides, an Apple Keynote like presentation program built using Cappuccino. [2]

Now, finally, see Atlas, an IDE and interface builder for developing programs in Cappuccino, created using Cappuccino. [3] Watch the video demo -- it is pretty mind-blowing. It is all in the browser, and it is all JavaScript.

Oh, don't forget, see all of this in the glory of the new Safari 4 b1 with its fancy canvas tag and new JavaScript engine which makes gee- whiz stuff like all of above possible. [4]

The Apple iPhone maps application is written in Obj-C, as far as I can tell. All the fire and light with no flash whatsoever.

Predictions are almost always wrong, and in that spirit, I predict that the future of web is not going to be a flash in the pan. I can't imagine Microsoft giving in to Adobe. Wait, they already created and are pushing Silverlight. So, MS and Adobe will slug it out, while Google and Apple are going to not waste much energy getting into that war, and webkit and its technologies will provide an alternative.  
Finally we will put our souped up 3 GHz computers to good use instead of just wasting all that CPU cycles and RAM writing MS-Word documents.

http://cappuccino.org
http://280slides.com
http://280atlas.com
http://www.apple.com/safari/

--
Puneet Kishor