Tracksters,
This is huge. This is bigger than the biggest thing you can think of.
It was announced a month or more ago, and I thought at the time that it looked very cool. When they announced that Open Source apps would be able to use Slingshot free of charge, I got even more interested, but I didn’t want to say anything about it here until I’d tried it - no need to get everyone excited for no reason.
You can read the page linked above for more details, but basically, Slingshot is a framework to allow you to run Rails applications as if they were native applications. You can run them seamlessly offline, then sync data to a server when online. You can drag and drop stuff, just like a native application, and (almost best of all, as far as I’m concerned), you can distribute applications for Mac and Windows with everything included: just one application package that you drag to /Applications, double click to run and go.
Pretty smooth, no?
They released it today, and after only about five minutes of messing about, I produced this movie.
I haven’t tried syncing or online/offline mode, or drag and drop, but it works, it’s snappy, and it was dead easy.
Yum. I think we’re going to have some fun with this.
