I think I’m more excited and inspired by what the guys at 280 North are doing than by anything else I’ve seen on the web in a long time. For starters, they actually started a company dedicated to fulfilling a real need by building commercial software that they could charge for, rather than building yet another social blah blah blah lifestream blah blah blah. Second, and more obviously, as a bit of Objective-C runtime enthusiast (and someone who finds himself roundly underwhelmed by the engineering chops of most web startups these days), I have to admire the panache of a three person company that decides to reimplement the Obj-C runtime in Javascript. Combine this with the performance increases the next generation Javascript engines are likely to offer, and the prospect of eventually being able to share code between web and Cocoa apps is intriguing indeed.
The next thing that would be interesting to see: some Obj-J/Obj-C bridge code, which could make for a very slick way of doing CSS-based UIs for desktop Cocoa apps. (Update: Now that I’ve talked to the 280 guys a bit and understand what they’re doing better, I think this was missing the point a bit. Still, might be an interesting intellectual exercise.)
