Disclaimer: It could be that I'm missing something, or everything, and if that's the case I apologize in advance.
I'm working slowly in the background on the new EC2 for Poets, and have come across some missing pieces in the Node and Unix worlds, that I just can't believe are still there. Here are a couple.
There doesn't appear to be a way to save a Node app as an executable. I understand this might end up being a big thing, but disks are huge these days and the net is super fast. My Android phone today downloaded Angry Birds 2. Sixty megabytes. In a few seconds. And even if a Node "applet" required that Node be installed, so what? Just make it so that when I type its name on the command line, something happens. Without the "node" part and without the ",js" part. (Double-clickable scripts is something we had working on the Mac in 1992, btw.)
There is the equivalent of the "Startup Items" folder on Unix, but I took one look at the docs and realized that I won't know how to use that for six months. It will take that long for all the odd concepts to settle in. Meanwhile on the Mac (or Windows for that matter) just drag anything that the OS can run into the Startup folder and it figures out what to do with it.
Also I'm taking a look at forever-service for running Node code at startup. I haven't gotten it to actually do anything yet, but it looks simple enough. And I love forever, I use it on all my servers to keep stuff running.