The first ever Cappuccino conference was a massive success. CappCon 2011 had a diverse set of attendees from six different continents and included both speakers and sponsors from Pixar, Google, Sofa, Push Pop Press, Shopify, and many others. The overall theme of the conference was “Design, Develop, Distribute”; everything you need in order to build a successful app. The talks explored this theme and covered a huge breadth of knowledge, while each one explored its topic in satisfying detail. In addition, all seven members of the core team were in the same room at the same time to answer questions from the community.
Two of our favorite reactions were “this is the best conference I’ve ever been to” and “CappCon was better than WWDC.”
Announcements
Perhaps the most exciting part of the event was the amount of projects revealed and released! If you didn’t follow the event on Twitter, here is a quick overview of announcements made:
- Language.js: Objective-J author Francisco Tolmasky has open sourced his new parser generator. Language.js gives you first class error reporting as well as unprecedented speed. This new parser generator will be the basis for Objective-J 2.0, which will open many unheard-of opportunities for the language. Language.js on GitHub.
- CoreText and CPTextView: Cappuccino core team member Nick Small showed off his new implementation of CoreText and CPTextView. These amazing new controls for rich text represent the first time ever we will have desktop-class rich text on the web, which also offers feature parity with Cocoa’s NSTextView. CPTextView will be available soon, but CoreText is open source now, in its own branch in Cappuccino mainline.
- Aristo 2.0: Sofa has worked hard to provide a new version of the already best-in-class Aristo theme that we have already started to implement in Cappuccino. Aristo 2.0 accomplishes some new goals, mainly to “under-promise and over-deliver,” something we’ll talk more about in the coming weeks. Preview of Aristo 2.0.
- Frappuccino and RunKit: Austin Sarner and Mark Davis will be open sourcing their physics-based animation toolkit, and alternative UI framework.
The Future
Of course there were many more announcements and talks, and the videos and slides for every talk will be available in the coming weeks. The atmosphere at CappCon was infectious; people were thrilled to attend, learn, talk, and interact.
Most importantly, everyone present was a part of the future of Cappuccino. The takeaway from the event is that Cappuccino is stronger than ever, and with some incredible things in the pipeline, it’s poised to get even better.
Thanks to everyone who could attend, and we hope to see everyone again next year!
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