It’s Alive! Taking Android’s App Inventor For A Spin

By now you've probably heard of 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. The technology has been in testing for a year, primarily with educational organizations, and may well be a boon for the Android ecosystem as students are introduced to the platform in the classroom. 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.” So does this mean Android's millions of users are about to start programming for their own devices? Not quite. I spent around 90 minutes this morning cranking away on a few test applications in App Inventor, and while I'm very excited about it, this is not going to be a walk in the park for "ordinary people". Unless you're looking to make an extremely basic application — think "Hello World" — you're going to have to read through the documentation, and in some cases even the existing tutorials won't be enough. That said, this will be absolutely perfect for the classroom environment for which it's been tested in. The learning curve is not trivial, but this isn't something that will take years to master, either.