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The Android Gets Its HyperCard
theodp writes "Steve Jobs & Co. put the kibosh on easier cellphone development, but Google is giving it a shot. The NY Times reports that Google is bringing Android software development to the masses, offering a software tool starting Monday that's intended to make it easy for people to write applications for its Android phones. The free software, called Google App Inventor for Android, has been under development for a year. User testing has been done mainly in schools with groups that included sixth graders, high school girls, nursing students and university undergraduates who are not CS majors. The thinking behind the initiative, Google said, is that as cellphones increasingly become the computers that people rely on most, users should be able to make applications themselves. It's something Apple should be taking very seriously, advises TechCrunch."
... to contradict the previous story. Power to the people!
This reminds me of the early 1990s trend of "programming for everyone", particularly Macromedia's Lingo in Director. Languages and environments that start this way quickly realize that the end products would be ever so slightly more appealing if they were more flexible. And flexibility is the end of simplicity. The 1.0 of this language is going to be fine for a few intrepid schoolgirls, but soon they're going to have to add basic programming concepts and structures which will leave most people scratching their heads. Haven't we already seen this dramatic arc with Director and Flash?
Go read some bible: nubible.com
This is what is great about Google they offer different services to compete with Apple. Plus the whole point of creating your own apps made easy is just really cool and a great touch by Google. I think if this catches on this could be a big selling point for Google.
http://www.thetechnologygeek.org
Can we just have a "Google" section already? This might as well be filed under Microsoft, with references being made to "Developers, Developers, Developers!"
I don't think I understand you correctly: nobody forces you to install those millions of fart-apps! If they find their audience among the teens, why not? Do you really notice that the whole web is literally overwhelmed by pages of similar (i.e. non-existent) quality?
The problem is not that Android Market will be flooded by low-quality apps. The problem is that Android Market has pretty rudimentary app search and filtering capabilities to reduce signal to noise ratio. Sorry for the irony, but Google must build a decent search engine for Android apps.
I took a look at the demostration videos and whatnot, and the user interface seems to be a cross between XCode's interface builder and MIT's Scratch. The code is written by dragging "puzzle pieces" into place, just like in Scratch. However, I assume this uses Java rather than Squeak? Scratch is kind of a lot different than HyperCard, but, you know... whatever. If only my BlackBerry Storm hadn't turned me off smartphones forever, I might actually be inclined to give this a shot.
just give us proper scripting with proper exposure of the internals to the scripting language
like hp calculators have RPL.
i see stuff on the android market that would take 3 lines of scripting to accomplish... yet they are presented as "apps".
Looking for people to chat about multicopters, coding, music. skype: gtsiros
A simple App maker like hypercard was? It is supported on Windows, OS X, and Ubuntu. It also works with both Java 1.5 and 1.6. Way to go Google! You may have finally hit upon a great way to outcompete Apple in the mobile space. I just hope you're working on improving the Android Market in a big hurry.
i'll just reply to you, since many others have already replied to me saying search etc..
I dont care if people want fart apps, or even milions of them, but if, when browsing an app-store, i end up wading through thousands of pieces of junk to find one or two actually good apps, that is annoying. I find this already happens a lot on the apple app-store, the mechanisms for searching etc. simply arent 'fast' enough for my taste, i spend too much time scrolling or whatever.
truth be told, i am very curious about android and the android market, i have no doubt that as soon as my contract is up for renewal i'll get a nice android phone
People, what a bunch of bastards
Who knows, you may be surprised by what application may be developed by a high school girl.
My guess is: The same as operas written by computer geeks.
No, I don't mean the browser.
The basis of society as we know it is division of labour. Let people do what they are good at, and give the parts they aren't to someone else. We don't need 5 million nonsensical crap applications on the marketplace. What we need is a way to request applications. If 1000 people want a fart app and are willing to pay $0.99 for it, I'm sure someone will write one.
Right now, there's no way for the consumer to tell the market what you are looking for. Back when we came up with all this Internet thing, wasn't the fact that it makes bi-directional communication possible one of its best features? Instead of having only the big corporations being able to talk to the costumers via advertisement and press releases, the customer could talk back and the companies would listen?
Whatever happened to that? Wouldn't the app market with its thousands of small developers a fantastic place for this old dream? Tell them what you need, or what the available apps are lacking, and the chances that someone will set out to satisfy that need are better than ever before.
That would be a true innovation that drives the app store or marketplace or whatever you want to call it forward. Apple is too much into the uni-directional conversation for that to happen, Google could make it happen. Don't tell me that with all the very smart people they employ, nobody has dug up this idea from the 90s.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
This is a situation where, I suspect, Apple will not follow unless placed under real pressure.
Look at Apple's release model, particularly for iDevice stuff, it is the very opposite of "early and often". They are totally willing to take flack(cut and paste, MMS, multitasking, etc.) for as long as necessary in the service of delivering what they consider to be the "right" solution. Obviously, they do do iterated development as well(just ask anybody who had to endure OSX before about 10.3...); but Apple, in the present day, has a strong bias against "good enough and a lot faster/cheaper" type stuff.
Releasing an environment explicitly designed to lower the barrier to entry for application creation would have an effect precisely contrary to Apple's design aesthetic and integration philosophy. Consider the analogy of MS Access in the context of Win32 desktop software. On the one hand, the existence of that application is probably responsible for the existence of more utterly rubbish "applications" than just about anything else on earth. On the other hand, it has allowed millions of people who are basically nonprogrammers to hack together "good enough" applications to solve the weird little application-specific problems that are important to them or their business, and which are too small to pay for a real developer.
Google's "App Inventor" will very likely have similar results: large numbers of people who would otherwise be unable to create any software will create bad software that is "good enough" because, while bad, it is precisely tailored to problems that they care about. Apple could, in all likelihood, create such a system if they were so inclined; but there are two reasons to suspect that they won't(again, unless they find themselves under really heavy competitive pressure, which they haven't yet. Android has grown phenomenally; but mostly by sniping geeks, eating the WinMo and legacy-Palm markets, and pretty much crushing the "high end dumbphone", not by cutting the iPhone user base): One, Apple currently has the substantial majority of 3rd party developers, and many of the ones considered to be doing the best work. Two, "good enough" makes Steve cry, and the programs that will come out of any bar-lowering super-simple application development environment will just ooze "good enough" from every pore...
Keep in mind that among the flood of horrid homepages with purple backgrounds, jumping frogs, blinking stars and background MIDI tunes, there also emerged hundreds of thousands of highly valuable niche Web resources created by highly motivated nonprofessionals ... and Google figured out a (community-powered) algorithm for finding the good stuff.
I'm sorry, the app store is already flooded with developer who are unable to create software.
... is the fact, that the guy behind this project is Harold Abelson, author of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs! He described LISP "picture language" in the book as a useful learning concept. He also "...directed the first implementation of LOGO for the Apple II" which seems interesting in this case.
You can't have a lot of kids knowing how to program tomorrow if you don't spark their interest with such a tool today. And IMO this will be great not only for attracting and educating future software engineers, but also to tap into the pool of active talented kids who are not going to be software engineers, ever. The kids who will be nuclear physicists, radio geeks, astronomy fans, journalists will also acquire basic programming abilities without distracting from their main specialty to learn a programming language or two, dive into a complex SDK and constantly work to keep these skills up to date.
In short, I think that App Inventor is pretty awesome.
Actually, as a usability expert, I really wish we were using one button mice. Well, not really. I wish Windows was designed to work with a single button mouse and that was the default type of mouse shipped with consumer systems. I'm also happy with variable-button mice which can become multi-button mice depending upon the software or user settings; but which default to a single button setup.
So, as a "usability expert", you advocate dumbing things down to a preschooler level...instead of advocating people learning how to distinguish between button #1 and button #2? Hell, even first graders can do that...ever see the "what's different" challenges in Highlights? Seriously...if someone is struggling with two buttons, they shouldn't be using a computer.
You can call that being a dick, you can call that not listening to user's problems, you can call it whatever you like....but people can differentiate between a gas and a brake pedal. They should do the same between a left and a right mouse button.
The truth is, a one button mouse setup leads to a great many usability improvements.
Source? If anything, it would make things WORSE. You would have to use the keyboard to modify how that one mouse button functions. So now, instead of just clicking the button next to one the user is already using, you want them to have to find a specific key on a keyboard to act as a modifier? They already have trouble using two buttons on the same object...what makes you think they could choose one out of 104 buttons on a separate object?
Look. I can understand what you're getting at...I just think you are way off base. Your point about tablets have some credence to them, but their problem isn't that the interfaces weren't originally designed for a single mouse-button....the problem is that tablets have no buttons. That takes time to perfect and for people to get used to. Nothing more.
Living With a Nerd
What's more is that this application will bring programming "back" the the masses.
I'm a (former) high school teacher myself, and I'm getting near jitters thinking about how fired up my kids would get if they could program their own mobile phone app with the same ease of making a Powerpoint Presentation (younger students *LOVE* making powerpoint, quite often "reward time" would be "if you're all good, I'll let you make a powerpoint about whatever you want")
Think about how amazing it would be to teach a whole year class about creating an App for your phone. "Think of a problem that needs solving" - what buttons do you need? what do the buttons have to do? now draw the screens on paper, now draw the buttons in the interface... now here's how we add "actions" to the buttons.
Want to do something that's more complex? Maybe we need to look "behind the design, at the code"
How many people here grew up on the Apple ][ or on BASIC programs for the C64?
This is fucking revolutionary! What a great time to be alive!
I'm so excited I think I just peed a little :)
At the risk of sounding sentimental, I think lowering the barrier for entry for app building is a step toward my personal vision of utopia. "solve[ing] the weird little application-specific problems that are important to them or their business, and which are too small to pay for a real developer" is exactly how you end up with the most diverse software environment possible, and get the really inventive, out-of-left-field creatives to participate.
A higher barrier for entry certainly has not prevented the deluge of "iFart" apps.