dflem -- we suggest using tools to do the work (ie: sure its appending pxml to the iso, but using a script lets us update this behaviour in the future without risking incompatibilities. ie: we've often gabbed about putting icons in the append list, and index files to show the offsets to appended bits, and all sorts of _madness_ but in the the end we went with simple, first.. but be nice to refer to the sh as 'faith' for most people.) But yeah, what dflem said

dflem knows his shit, listen to him
1) Apps can be pxml apps -- a directory with a PXML.xml file; naturally you can do that anywhere with zero effort
2) Apps can be .pnd files, and we include a simple script to assemble them (which does work on pandora.) We expect peopel to hack out a pile of toosl to do this on whatever platform in easy ways
I'm sure people will pump out tools to make PXML.xml files, and maybe I or someone shoudl make a sh scirpt that just makes a dumb template nearly-empty one.
Hell, I don't expect anyone to use any of the code we're supplkying realy, but its all made relatively simple and most of the ewokr is standard linux stuff, so no biggy, and yes, you can do what you want
The one thign I've been mulling over is .. maybe I or someone needs to start writing up some scant details in the wiki (rather than our private dev wiki), so informatiion begins to be centralized. Sadly, I hadn't anticipated having 3-4 months of life get destroyed by work (yay for layoffs meaning us non-laid-off are working two jobs at once effectively, and I'm not the only one in the volunteer dev team in this boat :/) I'll get to it
The libpnd and associated is all in the git mind you though, so you can see the pnd_run.sh and pnd_make.sh and such right now if you like. (libpnd invokes pnd_run to run apps, and .desktop files will refer to pnd_run.sh in their Exec lines to run the apps. pnd_run runs pnd and pxml.xml dir apps, with all the clever mounting magic we've talked about. pnd_make.sh just does some iso and cat magic to turn a PXML.xml app dir into a .pnd file, and the system shoudl more or less treat app-dir and .pnd apps as the same.
libpnd includs pndnotifyd a little daemon hack I made which watches certain (configured, everythign is configured out the wazoo) paths, and when you change those paths (drop new files in, or remove some, say) it will cause the various launchers/etc to rescan for apps, and auto generate .desktop files and all that business.
All works on the pandora itself, or you can make pnds and such on your deskotp, or whatever
jeff