Mike Driscoll has a recent ebook on wxPython that is a good jumpstart if you are familiar with Python. There are a host of other resources for Qt/PyQt available via Google.
You can, of course, use any of the NodeJS frameworks as well. In the absence of any clear requirements, any of these will work.
When I got started, Junior developers were assigned to senior developers doing maintenance programming. It was important work but it also gave you time to come up to speed on the system without the crush of new feature development deadlines. Sadly, it seems that not only do companies not do that these days but the new breed of developers seem to think they are too good to do maintenance programming. I learned a great deal about how systems really work and how to write robust software from some great mentors who had been moved to maintenance work as they neared retirement but companies these days are quick to lose older developers in favor of less experienced and less expensive younger developers. Lots of tribal knowledge is lost in that fashion every year.
I am so saddened by your loss. Depression has taken so many people from all of us and shows no sign of being solved. My hope is that he's at peace and that you are able to find the inner strength to continue living, as difficult as that will be. Please know that you're in our thoughts and hearts as you go through this awful time.
Do we actually need to contact support to be upgraded? My understanding from the old Shared Accelerator documentation[1] (which you seem to have deleted) was that we were supposed to wait to be offered a “golden ticket”, unless we absolutely needed to be upgraded ASAP.
Are you even still offering regular (not “cloud”) web hosting? I can't find it on Joyent's site anymore; it seems as if the Shared Accelerator plans are discontinued, too.
And that wiki has up-to-date information on migrating from TextDrive to what are apparently now called “Shared SmartMachines” (formerly Shared Accelerators). And that page finally does resolve the question of whether we need to contact them or wait to be contacted: We do need to ask for a golden ticket, not just wait for it.
That's pretty well buried. Joyent really should send out a mass email to all TextDrive users asking us to upgrade, telling us exactly what effect it would have on our billing, and telling us exactly what we need to do.
It's still unclear whether, in the special case of Howe, we still need to ask for golden tickets, or all Howe users are being migrated to Shared SmartMachines without having to ask. The support post:
implies that they are rebuilding Howe, which implies that we will not simply be migrated to a Shared SmartMachine as a result of the failure (we still would need to ask), but they have not directly said.
The one remaining worry I have is that there's nothing on the main Joyent site about Shared SmartMachines. It seems like they're inviting users of one deprecated service to migrate to another deprecated service.
Same experience for me. I have a lifetime account and they offered the migration to me for free. Granted, I had nothing but email and a vanilla CMS running so I had simple needs but the migration was very smooth.
There really isn't one. Symbian might be the closest that's still out there. Android would be somewhat quirky at best, and Apple wants you to use their toolchain.
Having said that, take a look at Appcelerator's Titanium (appcelerator.com) or AppMakr (appmakr.com). They both provide tools that enable you to create HTML/CSS/Javascript screens and also intermingle with other scripting languages to produce a compiled app for desktop, Apple, Android, and others.
Yes, he said that he wants people to be able to use the app without having to be on the internet. I mentioned Mozilla Prism and Google Gears as well as small web servers like Abyss, but he's not too keen on that approach. I'm sure that there may be performance issues that he hasn't mentioned as well, but his primary motive seems to be that internet connectivity should not be a requirement.
Shoes was interesting because it took the approach of being completely standalone, but _whytheluckystiff has vanished so in some regards the driver behind that project is gone.
I've pointed out Supercard and Runtime Revolution as descendants of Hypercard, but I think he's trying to avoid having any out of pocket costs.
Most likely something like Chrome might be possible, but not everyone has (or wants) to install Chrome just to run an app. However, I'm still open to any ideas that I can pass along.
wxWidgets (C++) / wxPython (Python) Qt (C++) / PyQT (Python)
Mike Driscoll has a recent ebook on wxPython that is a good jumpstart if you are familiar with Python. There are a host of other resources for Qt/PyQt available via Google.
You can, of course, use any of the NodeJS frameworks as well. In the absence of any clear requirements, any of these will work.