Yesterday, 280 North launched the public beta of their first application, 280 Slides, which lets you create presentations quickly and easily right in your desktop browser. Our friends at TUAW suggest that “280 North turns making beautiful, web-based presentations into quick work.”

The application is built on a platform called Cappuccino, using a library called Objective-J (named for its similarities to Objective-C), which provides a highly useful layer of functionality to standard javascript. According to 280 North, Objective-J provides a web development platform that is more “Cocoa-like” by removing a lot of the lower-level variables that are the bane of most web developers.

TUAW reports that 2 of the three members of 280 North are former Apple employees, working on the iPhone and iTunes, respectively. They state that 280 Slides isn’t so much “Apple-inspired” as it is “good-inspired,” but the Keynote resemblance is hard to deny, especially in comparison to other, less-polished web-based presentation apps.

Be sure to click over to TUAW for a video interview with 280 North and learn more about Objective J in this interview with with Ajaxian.