If you pay attention to the login page of TimeTable you’ll notice that there has been a download button for Mac, Windows, Linux, and the iPhone. This may confuse most people as  TimeTable is branded a web app. The awesome thing about a web application is that you can access your data from anywhere in the world. For some reason though there is a nice feel when you use applications on the desktop that you don’t always feel when your application runs in the browser. Most of the time this is because web applications are poorly designed. Because Cappuccino makes it incredibly easy to make desktop class applications in the browser this really isn’t an excuse for TimeTable. So what is it then? Well, I tend to think people are just used to desktop applications and keep themselves on the desktop because they don’t like the change.

As of last night I was able to get the TimeTable running as a native application on the Mac. So what does this mean? Well, with a great technology called WebTop which is supplied with 280 Atlas, I was able to build TimeTable to run on the desktop. What is so awesome about this is that while I was a private alpha tester for Atlas I did not use Atlas to build the TimeTable interface. What this means is that I took my existing Cappuccino application and built it with Atlas. Albeit TimeTable failed to build with Atlas it wasn’t hard for me to take a few minutes to get it working. The problem here is that Atlas doesn’t play nice with my custom frameworks that I use for Timetable.

So lets talk about actually getting TimeTable running on the desktop. First off this is what it looks like. http://timetableapp.com/PR/DesktopVersion.png Even though I built the desktop version of TimeTable with the source code for the release candidate I wouldn’t consider this version even a beta. In order to get Timetable to work on the desktop I had to disabled all the server features of TimeTable. More specifically I turned off the ability to create invoices, sync data, access your online account, etc. This of course is not going to be ideal for a shipping product, but nevertheless the fact that it actually runs is pretty exciting.

I will make sure not to focus too much of my time on the desktop version of TimeTable yet. The most important thing is that I get a solid 1.0 release of TimeTable shipped for the browser. If everything goes as planned (I’m not really expecting it to though) I should get a desktop version of Timetable shipped within a few weeks of the actual TimeTable 1.0 release. The desktop version of TimeTable will run on both Windows and Mac OS X. I will likely drop support for Linux at this point because Atlas will not support it.

At this point I’ll have time to work on the iPhone version of TimeTable. This will complete the circle. You will have access to your work data from your work desk with a native version or web version, from your home desk with the web version, and from your location away from your home or office with the iPhone version.

The beauty of this is that because TimeTable was written a platform agnostic language (Cappuccino) via web standards what you use on Mac OS X, Windows, and in your browser will be the exact same thing.

This is an exciting era for web applications, and I am so proud that TimeTable will be with the best of the best at the forefront of this revolution.

Thank you,
Randy Luecke

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 6th, 2009 at 3:09 am and is filed under TimeTable. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.