The Pakistani Spectator

Google’s App Inventor for Android, a web-based development environment that’s meant to make it possible for non-developers to build their own Android applications. So now you can start developing for your own phone without any technical glitch.

Flash and web editors like Front Page and their ilk led to an explosion in web sites because you no longer needed a *nix guru to put up a web site. Now in AppInventor mobile computing has a powerful entry into the arena that is poised to fill that same role as a tool to allow a much, much larger audience to create useful smart phone applications quickly when before you had to be a Java and Eclipse (or similar) expert to get anything useful done that was not a straight web app.

Some people need a professional, some people just need something quick and simple. If a person’s requirements were to make a lil 4 color paint app, that person sure is better off with AppInventor rather than paying my hourly rate to build a custom app for them, and I’ll be first to tell that to prospective clients.

A report in the New York Times quotes project lead (and MIT professor) Harold Abelson as saying “These aren’t the slickest applications in the world… but they are ones ordinary people can make, often in a matter of minutes.” Getting started on App Inventor is easy relative to installing Eclipse and the Android SDK. Plug in the phone, log-in to App Inventor, allow the Java app to run, and you should be good to go. It may sound like a lot, but the whole process won’t take more than ten minutes if you know what you’re doing.