Cloud9 IDE is amazing and it got released to public today! I am having dreams at night about the potential of this project. Especially for JavaScript based RIA (rich internet applications). I have been working on my JavaScript MVC framework pushing the concept that all the server will doing is serving and storing data which will be delivered in JSON/JSONp, and this tool let's me develop the whole app inside of the browser. With the great bonus that you have nodejs as a server, so you can develop server-side/client-side JavaScript along each other. Plugin in a nice test framework, TDD (test driven development) will be a blaze!
I was actually emailing with one of the core developers (Fabian Jakobs) of Clound9 IDE having some basic questions, so here are the answers:
1. How do I commit the code back to github?
You need to clone from a read/write github url (starting with git@). After cloning you are asked to upload your cloud9 public key to github. Afterwards you can use command line git from the console at the bottom of the page.
2. I am also running the local version, and have not figure out a way to open a project/load my own code from a directory.
The local server supports a bunch of command line arguments. With "-w" you can specify a workspace directory. With "-l" you specify the host cloud9 is listening on. By default it can only be accessed from localhost.