280 Slides

» see 280slides.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Three college friends started 280 North in 2008. Francisco Tolmasky and Ross Boucher had both come out of Apple, Tolmasky off the iPhone and Boucher off iTunes, and Tom Robinson completed the set. What they set out to build was a language and a framework: Objective-J, which sits on top of JavaScript the way Objective-C sits on top of C, and Cappuccino, which is a reimplementation of Apple's Cocoa API for the browser. Both were released as open source.

Nobody funds a framework, so they built something with it. 280 Slides launched on 5 June 2008 and looked, deliberately, like Keynote. It had a real menu bar, real inspectors, drag handles that behaved, undo that went back further than one step, and it ran in a browser tab in 2008 with no plugin. You could import a PowerPoint file and export one back out. There was no account to make and nothing to pay. The whole point was the shock of the thing running at all.

Motorola bought 280 North on 24 August 2010 for twenty million dollars. The reporting at the time was clear about what was being bought: the toolchain and the people who understood it, for use on Android. The presentation app came along as a side effect. A notice went up in November 2011 giving users until 21 December to save their presentations, and on that day the beta ended. The team's next project, a visual IDE called Atlas, had been promised as open source before the acquisition and was kept private afterward.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the part that was not the app ~

Objective-J added a compiler step to JavaScript so you could write message-passing syntax with square brackets, and Cappuccino gave you the AppKit vocabulary in a page, NSWindow and NSView included. For a developer who had written Mac software, it meant your existing knowledge transferred straight to the web without learning anybody's DOM conventions. For everybody else it looked like an enormous amount of machinery to put between a person and an HTML document, and that is roughly the argument that decided the next decade: the industry went with libraries that embraced the browser rather than ones that papered over it.

Cappuccino is still maintained as open source, a long time after the company and the app both stopped existing. Most acquisitions do not leave that much behind.

~ the save-your-work notice ~

Shutdown notices for free beta web apps in 2011 were short, and this one was no exception: discontinuing the beta program on 21 December, please save your presentations. There was no extension, and no competitor stepped in to adopt the user base. The only way out was the PowerPoint download that had been there since launch.

~ what sits on the address today ~

280slides.com redirects to autoppt.com, an AI slide generator. The pitch in 2008 was that your presentation software did not need to be installed. The pitch now is that it does not need to be written.

~ from the other side of a 2008 connection ~

In 2008 the open question among people who wrote software was whether a browser tab could hold a real application, and the way you argued about it was by sending somebody a URL. 280 Slides was what you opened to settle that argument. You resized the window, you dragged a shape around, you watched whether the menus stuttered, and then you closed the tab. Nobody I knew ever kept a presentation in it. What Motorola paid twenty million dollars for was the part underneath.

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