It seems so obvious to me that the problem with Internet Apps is the web. Get rid of the web and make a system designed to do what you want. How can it be any simpler than that?
NEWI\O STATUS: I am finishing up adding video support and I want to fix the event system, perhaps even add a proper event queue, and then release again, hopefully this week.
After that I want to port Bob Pendelton's demo game Bounce to NewI\O. It is a more involved graphics app demo and would be an excellent and impressive test of NewI\O's capabilities. I do not expect it will be difficult to port.
Then I want to release NewI\O again, probably to the wider SDL mailing list.