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.