When 280slides was released several months ago, it was notable in several ways. It looked like a native OS X app despite running in the browser, yet remained relatively responsive, worked quite well across browsers, and gracefully fell back to Flash when running on browsers from the Pacific northwest. The designers said that their secret sauce was Objective-J—an Objective-C–like language that compiled to JavaScript—and Cappuccino, a Cocoa-like framework that let them treat a web browswer as just another desktop platform. Unfortunately, since both technologies were developed in-house, the rest of us had to just look on and keep playing with their old toys.

Well, wait no longer. Cappuccino and Objective-J are now available under the LGPL, and you can download them today. If you’re planning on developing an application-like website soon, Cappuccino is probably worth a look. I’m not going to have a chance to play with it for a few more days because my hair is on fire, but for those of you with a bit more freetime, it’s definitely worth a look.