Colby, Interesting side note... I briefly worked with them. Not open-sourcing Atlas was a huge mistake. I'm glad that Cappuccino is still around. One thing I had considered doing back then was creating a way to export to .cib (the format used by Atlas) so that people could create these files for the Cappuccino apps. I'm not sure how prevalent Cappuccino is, so I can't confirm whether this is still worth pursuing.
Yours, GC On Sun, Jul 5, 2026 at 8:57 PM Colby Russell <[email protected]> wrote: > I thought the earlier Ambrosia screenshots showed promise. > > Some number of years ago, a startup called 280 North created two noteworthy > applications: a slideshow creator and an Interface Builder clone called > Atlas. > (They also released the Cappuccino framework, which was basically a Cocoa > clone for browser-based apps. Tracking down the Atlas demo videos are well > worth the time.) > > They were eventually acquired, but the Atlas codebase unfortunately never > open-sourced, and then it disappeared. However, Cappuccino is still around > and has always been LGPL. > > Before the acquisition, they'd used some of their startup funding to > contract > with a professional design agency to create a theme for Cappuccino called > Aristo. > > - <https://www.cappuccino.dev/aristo/> > - <https://github.com/cappuccino/aristo> > > I heartily recommend that you take wholesale from Aristo and make it the > default theme for Ambrosia (even if you yourself don't find it to your > taste > and configure your personal machine to something more in line with the > screenshot you've included here). One of the biggest factors in getting > people to be excited about a project like GNUStep/Ambrosia and a > willingness > to try it is providing an immediately attractive and accessible > out-of-the-box > experience. > > Xamarin also paid for an overhaul of MonoDevelop that resulted in a new > theme > before they were acquired Microsoft. I suggest borrowing from that > work, too, > to fill in the gaps (e.g. use the original iconset that the MonoDevelop > theme > used before they switched to flat UI). > > -- > Colby Russell > > > -- Gregory Casamento GNUstep Lead Developer / Black Lotus, Principal Consultant http://www.gnustep.org - http://heronsperch.blogspot.com https://www.openhub.net/languages/objective_c
