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Redwood is a "Spotlight for your web apps" -- it searches Basecamp, GMail, and GDocs from one search bar on your desktop. We'll add more sources going forward. Or, you'll be able to write your own plugins in Ruby, to search whatever you want. Download: http://redwoodapp.com/system/Redwood.zip. OSX 10.6 or later required.
## A little technical background on the app:
* It's written primarily in MacRuby 0.10 (trunk). You don't need MacRuby installed -- it's embedded in the application bundle.
* We use two gems: Nokogiri and GData, also embedded in the application bundle. We use macruby_deploy --gem, which makes gem bundling a breeze.
* We use a few Obj-C libraries: Sqlite3 for DB, FMDB for DB wrapper, ASIHTTPRequest for HTTP.
* the UI is rendered primarily in HTML/CSS, and events are passed back and forth between an embedded Webview and Cocoa.
Please give it a whirl, we'd appreciate any feedback. Download link again: http://redwoodapp.com/system/Redwood.zip.
With a 2010 15" 2.66Ghz i7 MBP, under normal development usage (a few ruby processes, a browser, code editor, MySQL) I get about 3 hours.
Under a controlled "light web browsing" environment, I get 5 hours:
* Dim screen brightness to 50%
* Turn bluetooth off, Wifi on
* Set display to never go to sleep & turn screensaver off
* Use http://http://codykrieger.com/gfxCardStatus/ to set graphics card to intel only
* Use itunes to play local music at a low volume through headphones only
* Use this script: to simulate light web browsing: http://gist.github.com/441222 . It writes a log so you know when the computer goes to sleep.
* Walk away from the the computer and wait for it to exhaust it's battery and go to sleep.
HNers -- I'd love to get your own datapoints.