Developer Leaves Apple, Still Works With Company To Develop SproutCore.

The developer of SproutCore, Charles Jolley, has decided to walk away from Apple and venture with his new startup company called Strobe. Charles, however, will still work in conjunction with Apple in order to further development of SproutCore as joint efforts from both parties. For those who are not familiar with the technology, SproutCore is an open standard, Cocoa-influenced JavaScript framework that makes web-apps seem much more like native ones.

Apple already use the technology on their iwork.com website as well as their Genius Bar appointment booking app on their main website. Cupertino uncovered Charles developments and had him apply it to the development of MobileMe. In 2008, Apple showcased the revamped version of .Mac as MobileMe with the SproutCore tech embedded. Apple now seems to be reapplying the “V2″ reiteration of the software to redesign MobileMe starting with MobileMe Mail and the recently announced rollout of the new MobileMe Calendar beta. The Calendar project seems to be Charles last project at Apple before he departs to develop the still fresh web-app aspect of technology through his startup. AppleInsider recently caught up with Chuck and asked him a few question about the departure.

“Strobe Inc. is about building, marrying the web and touch, where you get the best of both worlds: easy access to your data from any device (like the web), with a rich immersive interface (like native touch). SproutCore is very good at supporting just these types of apps; it will be at the center of everything we do. Strobe will be investing quite heavily in it”

He was also asked about the current state of the SproutCore community and the influence it has to developers.

“The SproutCore open source community is very healthy. We have about 1,500 people on our mailing list and a very active IRC channel. We also have 33 regular contributors to SproutCore, 75% not from Apple. I’ve always been more interested in influence over numbers with SproutCore. We tend to have key teams working on high profile projects at well known companies vs having a lot of tinkerers. Mozilla, for example, uses parts of it for their Bespin project. Gomez based parts of their products on it. There are a few other well known enterprise companies that are literally rewriting their entire product based on it. Total bet-the-company type of moves. All of the customers interested in Strobe’s SproutCore-based solution are household names in publishing. We are going to have even more big name support going forward,” Charles answered.

From our own impressions here at MacApper, the software definitely makes web applications perform much more like native ones. We are most certainly keeping an eye on the platform and it’s developments as we are very impressed with it’s performance.

share permalink ping 3 Comments