In terms of development, maybe it's not better than what you have on the desktop. If you're really productive in your environment (terminal + vim OR IDE), then

In terms of development, maybe it's not better than what you have on the desktop. If you're really productive in your environment (terminal + vim OR IDE), then it definitely doesn't make sense to develop on their JS editor. But in terms of hosting, it's a lot cheaper to host your Rails app using Heroku than getting a VPS. Both money-wise and time-wise. I only listened a few minutes into the podcast, but I think one of the founders mentioned that at its current state Heroku is great for people who want to make apps for their friends, like 1-20 people. But these developers don't want to buy a VPS plan and manage the application themselves. Their future goal is probably to get hosting for apps with 1000+ users, so they can make some money. But you're right, for developing an app, I'll probably stick to the desktop. Maybe one day Heroku will get so slick that we can do all development straight from the browser and hit "Publish", like Weebly.