Slashdot Mirror
Google Pulls Plug On Programming For the Masses
theodp writes "Google has decided to pull the plug on Android App Inventor, which was once touted as a game-changer for introductory computer science. In an odd post, Google encourages folks to 'Get Started!' with the very product it's announcing will be discontinued as a Google product. The move leaves CS Prof David Wolber baffled. ' In the case of App Inventor,' writes Wolber, 'the decision affects more than just your typical early adopter techie. It hurts kids and schools, and outfits like Iridescent, who use App Inventor in their Technovation after-school programs for high school girls, and Youth Radio's Mobile Action Lab, which teaches app building to kids in Oakland California. You've hurt professors and K-12 educators who have developed new courses and curricula with App Inventor at the core. You've hurt universities who have redesigned their programs.' Wolber adds: 'Even looking at it from Google's perspective, I find the decision puzzling. App Inventor was a public relations dream. Democratizing app building, empowering kids, women, and underrepresented groups — this is good press for a company continually in the news for anti-trust and other far less appealing issues. And the cost-benefit of the cut was negligible-believe it or not, App Inventor was a small team of just 5+ employees! The Math doesn't make sense.'"
Anyone who still does anything serious with Google's products kind of deserves it. Google has been for years putting some product up just to completely discontinue it soon enough. Unlike desktop software, Google discontinuing product means that you really cannot use it anymore. Google is really hurting itself and their image with this shit and ensuring competitors products like from Microsoft will continue to be widely used.
Google+ vs. Facebook, and why Google+ will fail
App Inventor was the Visual Basic of mobile dev. It allowed any untrained monkeys to churn out malware infested apps in 5 mins.
Democratizing app building, empowering kids, women, and underrepresented groups
So simple, even a woman can do it.
"Democratizing app building, empowering kids, women, and underrepresented group"
How dramatic. If it could do my bed and wash my dishes it'd be perfect.
from TFA:
"With the winding down of Google Labs, Google will discontinue App Inventor as a Google product and will open source the code. Additionally, because of App Inventor’s success in the education space, we are exploring opportunities to support the educational use of App Inventor on an open source platform."
...this thing hardly let you "invent" apps, so much as create boring cookie cutter apps.
Quoted from the original source at Google:
With the winding down of Google Labs, Google will discontinue App Inventor as a Google product and will open source the code. Additionally, because of App Inventor’s success in the education space, we are exploring opportunities to support the educational use of App Inventor on an open source platform.
source
If what I just said sounded like a troll, it was probably just a failed attempt at humor.
I said this when it came out and I'll say it again - where is the real demand for this from these people the author is quoting? I've yet to come across someone itching to create apps but with no desire to learn development. Those people who do want/think they want/have a need for an app have just zero interest in spending the (however small) effort doing it themselves and prefer to lean on techy friends.
jaymz
Who in their right mind would build anything, much less a business or curriculum off a google product? What was the end of life google gave you for this product when you did your research into it? Or did you just hop on the latest/greatest google thing du jour bandwagon?
Someday ppl will figure out that free crap from google comes with no guarantee of any kind. Use at your own risk.
Even the paid stuff comes with no service.
There's always Illumination Software Creator. Fully visual app development. And it supports not just Android... but iOS, Flash and more. http://radicalbreeze.com/
They're shutting down google labs, it's a google labs product and, as the blog post reads, "Google will discontinue App Inventor as a Google product and will open source the code" so all that's likely to happen is the URL will change, new eyes will look at and update the code and things will continue as normal.
Why is making it more accessible a bad thing?
I tried to use it as I got in on the early beta and tried several times to make a basic app. and Gave up in frustration several times.
Honestly, it was poorly designed from day one, and as a programmer if I was frustrated a "average joe" would have gave up 60 seconds in.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Five colored men destroyed the front yard of stricken uganda, started tonight when a colored man, known only as yellow slashed through the tripto under heart with a razor.. the white friend of the wounded man started after the negro who retreated to the toolshed.
And spin this as google being evil.
The real move here is one and only one, raise the quality of apps, App creator is responsible for a lot of crap.
Google is not getting rid of the Android App Inventory, just handing it over the something like sourceforge community. This is by no means a bad thing as there's some great open source educational software available. On that note if your actually trying to use this to make apps, open sourcing it may be the only way to achieve it.
Google is a corporation, and as such is obligated by federal law to work in the interests of their shareholders and stakeholders accordingly to increase profit both quarterly and yearly in dividend and share-price form.
as fervently as conservatives may tout the modern corporation as a model for the education system and a beacon of empowerment for minorities, it is not. corporations invest time and energy into consumers, and while often times this may have the ancillary effect of the betterment of all mankind, one need only a cursory evaluation of corporations such as Monsanto, Cargill, BP, and Halliburton to confirm the primary goal of any corporation at any size is revenue.
personally, im sorry you were tricked. Just because the corporation installs an impressive waterfountain, a modernist sculpture, or a google doodle at its office does not imply its dedication is in these things.
Good people go to bed earlier.
"You can use App Inventor to build just about any android app you can imagine"
A famous quote deserves recognition: "I'll Believe It When I See It"
Hell, I quit compiling anything for android. By the time I wait for the compiler to finish I have already lost money.
Actually this is the first time I actually heard of the product... Or if I did hear about it it didn't appeal to me. But why would colleges, schools and groups jump at this technology and invest all these resources when its usage is rather shady. Wait for wider acceptance first then you can change your programs. I am not saying it needs to be top dog but it should at least have a good buzz around it.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
BAD. bad. simple as that. a private company can just pull the plug on something masses rely on, and there may or may not be an alternative, and if not, an alternative may take years to come up. generations grow in the meantime.
this is why we need open source. so no private profiteers will be able to undo all of us in one fell swoop.
as for google - im saying this as a web developer ; its baaad bad p.r. for you. even from my perspective.
Read radical news here
> And the cost-benefit of the cut was negligible-believe it or not, App Inventor was a small team of just 5+ employees! The Math doesn't make sense.'"
One of those 5 employees parked in Sergey Brin's parking spot. The rest was inevitable.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
My choice...Illumination Software Creator! It is like Legos for programming: very visual and as simple or complex as you want it to be. Check it out at http://radicalbreeze.com/. It will build for "Windows, Linux or MacOS X desktops, Android devices, Nokia Internet Tablets (such as the N900) and even as Flash powered rich websites." The software runs on Windows, Linux, or MacOS X as well, making it well worth the $50 price tag.
from TFA:
"With the winding down of Google Labs, Google will discontinue App Inventor as a Google product and will open source the code. Additionally, because of App Inventor’s success in the education space, we are exploring opportunities to support the educational use of App Inventor on an open source platform."
I think it's pretty obvious what happened here. Because of close brushes with violating their "do no evil" mantra, Larry and Sergey have actually perfected time travel in order to ensure that no present actions result in future evil.
... and then, one fateful morning, as a particularly evil hacker was using App Inventor to build a smarter botnet he had the idea to use App Inventor to create an App that simply used App Inventor to progenate. And he succeeded in making it 0.000001% smarter than he himself was. And so it set out using App Inventor to make more programs that used App Inventor to make programs that were 0.000001% smarter than their parent program.
.NET Inventor overtook it.
As a result, the first subject has been sent into the future to report back only negative results from Google's products. When he returned beaten and battered and bruised, he declared that support and extensions of the App Inventor must be halted. Instead of assisting in learning, App Inventor gave uneducated kids the power of super hackers -- creating applications that could be viruses and malware. The explosion of malware on mobile phones sent markets reeling and devastated the world economy
Nothing to fear, right? RIGHT?
A few quadrillion iterations later (which Google's servers handled without any problem) and App Inventor had infected every system in the world. The result was a super brilliant application that could predict and see everything by harnessing the computation power of every implemented Turing Machine in the world. Therefore, Google had to kill App Inventor now while it still had the chance.
Larry and Sergey debated for hours whether App Inventor was inherently evil or the application of App Inventor. What was worse, was that Larry was convinced that if App Inventor was not left to run its course then mankind would face an even more evil post-apocalyptic future past that when Microsoft's
And so they came up with a simple, elegant solution that would shift all the blame onto the entire world should App Inventor become the end of mankind: open source it.
My work here is dung.
This is what happens when you rely upon a third party for a product or service with no contractual relationship to you. They pull the plug whenever they feel like it and you're left high and dry. How is saving money by using free service from "the cloud" different than the squirrels who play all summer instead of gathering seeds for the winter? To a casual observer unaware of the risks it sure seems dumb to forgo playing to work so hard while the weather's good. When the winter comes everyone will ask how it came to be that they have no food, and they'll dismiss the seed-gatherer who had the foresight to prepare for winter as having had a "lucky guess" about the future. See it not only in IT, but everything on a daily basis. People are idiots and have no ability to foresee the potential dangers in situations, and they don't prepare for bad things to happen.
Maybe someone should tell him. I'm sure he can make this right.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
Google is not a private company.
... where profit matters more than value given to customers.
Closing of Google Labs was sign of times to come.
Expect less freebies from them in times to come.
it was the geico ad, wasn't it?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oe-Y-zSd5gs
Geeze, and I really wanted to make a bro-stash app too
this is why we need open source. so no private profiteers will be able to undo all of us in one fell swoop.
With the winding down of Google Labs, Google will discontinue App Inventor as a Google product and will open source the code. Additionally, because of App Inventor’s success in the education space, we are exploring opportunities to support the educational use of App Inventor on an open source platform.
Empowering kids, women, minorities?? That's ridiculous. App Inventor's biggest problem is that it is too low-level. There is almost a one-to-one correspondence between every block in App Inventor and a single Java keyword or operator. Therefore there is NOTHING you can learn with App Inventor that you can't learn by learning to write source code. In fact the blocks themselves obscure meaning, because their visual representation doesn't convey much actual meaningful information. App Inventor could have been really, really good if it worked at a much higher level, and if the construction process wasn't so highly geometrically constrained and brittle.
already been nuked for the greater glory of Jeebuz
My kids have used 'Scratch'. I've no idea how this compares on details, but they were having a lot of fun with it, and from what I can see, it certainly creates an understanding of structured programming techniques.
http://scratch.mit.edu/
Democratizing app building, empowering kids, women, and underrepresented groups
Why, right you are, good sir! Capital idea! Our womenfolk would swoon right over with the vapors should they be forced to learn how to program our electromagnetistic computational whatnots the traditional way! The these "underrepresented groups" you speak of (wink wink), why they suffer constant indignities of many and varied brain fevers when attempting even the simplest mechanical tasks long ago mastered by proper Men of this Enlightened Age. It is demanded by Charity, not to mention we must field everything we have against the Encroachment by Foreign Undesirables! Cheerio, pip pip and all that!
Nuke 'em for Jesus
I like to bash google for kicks just as much as the next guy, but whenever you use *any* proprietary software you are basically renting it. If you based your spreadsheets on excel and decided not to pay the license, your files are basically junk. The less rent you pay the faster you should expect the software to disappear. Positioning oneself at the mercy of something like AI (as TFS makes it sound) is just dumb.
What's that? Google is open sourcing AI? Then what was everyone complaining about? Oh, google should continue to host it. We may debate the merits of Don't Be Evil, but it certainly doesn't mean Be a Charity. Perhaps they are expected to be a charity because they've previously sold us that image. I guess they *are* evil after all.
I think it's safe to say most of the people commenting haven't even tried App Inventor or tried it when it first came out. They've made some big improvements in it all around and it keeps getting better. To anybody that messed around with it for a full day and couldn't make an app, well all I can say is good luck in trying to get Eclipse set up.
Whats a Techie?
Google is now in the PHB phase, something that all companies enter when they become "mature."
This is when the traditional PHBs come in and take control. They cut back on proper R&D and innovation and decree that the company must concentrate on "core business."
There then follows a period of (hopefully) several years where the company is bled dry by the board of directors and the "investors." Meanwhile, the real innovation is done by small competitors and individuals with the good ideas and motivation.
A traditional company would ensure that they have a huge patent portfolio to crush this type of competition, to nip it in the bud.
After a few years, the company will become top heavy and any engineering will be outsourced. All that will be left is a few PHBs and a "brand."
Stick Men
that the children on the internet were all undercover FBI agents?
from Illumination Software: http://radicalbreeze.com/
Uhhhh, they open sourced it.
The claim isn't that members of these groups can't learn traditional CS, just that they've generally chosen not to.
Democratizing app building, empowering kids, women, and underrepresented groups
Because only adult white males are smart enough to use a programing language?
I mean really? And they are leaving it up until the end of the year and then open sourcing it. Maybe it just wasn't all that popular or useful.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I'm totally not a programmer (dipped my toes in Basica in my youth) and I used this to make a little dialer app specific to my companies PBX setup. It's working great! Unfortunately now I'll never be able to update it if need be.
Why do women need special treatment for programming?
Seriously they're either interested or not. And if they're not don't try to sucker them in.
I don't see the fashion industry trying to lure more men into the business.
"As part of phasing out Google Labs, we will be shutting down Breadcrumb by Sept. 2, 2011."
Source
It's not just app inventor, they're shutting down Labs.
I knew there was a reason they moved the link to the bottom of the page months ago.
will my fart machine still work ?
Perhaps the pressure was on from the rest of Google to not flood the job market with young, talented CS majors that were inspired by the App Inventor.
Good, maybe they have plans to drop Java from android and write a GUI similar to X11 where people will have a choice on how and what they want to write their applications in; While keeping a java runtime for app backwards compatibility.
I cant be the only one that hates Java with a passion.
Obviously 5 employees has nothing to do with the financial decision. The most obvious answer is that anyone and their brother can make an app with App Inventor, hence the flood of sound boards and useless apps. The point being that the flood makes good apps hard to gain attention amongst users and the indie developers that create them less likely to make well and continue to create more good apps. I think the better decision would have been to make a separate "inventor" section for inventor created apps, the better of which could be submitted for Google's approval (or a user voting measure) in order to be submitted to the primary app market.
The flood of silly apps and knockoffs, +1s , and other wastes of market space spreads the attention of users with $$ to spend on quality apps to thin.
And steal all their fish.
"And the cost-benefit of the cut was negligible-believe it or not, App Inventor was a small team of just 5+ employees! The Math doesn't make sense."
Let's do some math here:
5 employees dedicated to a project for one year * $100,000 per employee = $500,000 per year
Half a million dollars per year is not exactly free. There is also an opportunity cost there, those 5+ employees could have been working on other projects which potentially would have brought in more revenue.
5 employees == $600k per year in salary, plus benefits, plus bonuses, stock options, the office space to house them, their computers and maintenance on those computers, other IT costs associated with those employees, and so on. if you have hundreds of "cheap" projects like this, the cost adds up.
Hey, what's all that there * 2 malarkey?
It better not be for payroll taxes and overheads. Ah say, ah say, ah say we don't like none of that fancy MBA shit round these here parts, boy. We might not know the difference between sales and profits, but we know what Hollywood accounting is. It's bad, that's what it is.
So if we decide a steak that costs 20 bucks in a restaurant is overpriced because you could buy the same meat at a supermarket for 5, then it is, OK?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Wolber adds: 'Even looking at it from Google's perspective, I find the decision puzzling.
Microsoft and Apple likely both have "App" patents. I'm sure there is a secret cross-licensing agreement sealed with a NDA, preventing Google from continuing to support App Inventor. I base my statements on absolutely no evidence other than prevalent trends in the community and the absence of evidence itself. I am simply saying it should be considered as a possibility.
World to end: Women and minorities hardest hit
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
The funniest part of this incredibly horrible summary is the bit where it calls the post by Google "odd", because it contradicts the story they've decided on.
Obviously, not only are Google EVIL for KILLING OFF THIS IMPORTANT SOFTWARE, they are also INSANE because they seem to be saying that they are not killing it off!
If you don't control it, you don't own it. If you don't own it, you cannot rely on it.
Anything less than full control (i.e. you have the source and you can do with it what you will) means your usage is subject to the whims of those who do control it.
In other words, control it or lose it.
Buying service in the 'cloud'? Good luck with that. If you don't control it, your service provider controls you.
Relying on some closed source product provided by a big-name or no-name tech company? Good luck with that. That product might be discontinued tomorrow. This is why companies will often require source code for mission critical business apps, if not hands on access at least held in escrow, "just in case."
Yeah, I'm a control freak.
Now you know why.
There's also Alice: http://www.alice.org/
I got my start with that class in 10th grade. Who needs network support and 8-bit+ graphics? You can use the screen command to make random pretty colors appear. That was all I needed :P
That's the problem with these ivory tower educators. They couldn't care less about the politics involved in having app inventor in the first place. They rush headlong to support a company - Google - that is clearly in with the government.
They're right to be angry, but really, we all forked down this road along time ago. This is what happens when the proprietary system, together with the legal system (corrupt) wins it.
It just doesn't matter how advanced companies get, if they are ruled by government, they are nothing, and will eventually go back to printing paper if they're lucky.
This is what can happen when you put your trust in the cloud. I once bought some software that required online or phone authentication. When my hard drive die and I needed to re-install the software, the company was out of business. I could not re-install the software. I'll never trust business models like that again.
> and they completely lacked the ability to understand even functional, much less OO programming
I just want to take a moment to clarify terms. I think what you meant was procedural programming, not functional. Functional Programming (FP) is a reasonably advanced paradigm that many feel is a successor to OOP, it is used widely in languages such as Scheme, LISP, Python, ECMA Script derivatives, etc...
I don't have time to list all the pros/cons/differences/theories here, but a basic example off the top of my head (using js and jquery) would be:
..., ..., //do something ...
$(collection).each(function()
{
$(this).click(function(event)
{
$.ajax({
url:
data:
success: function(data, status, xhr)
{
$(data).each(function()
{
}
},
});
});
});
This kind of thing is a fairly basic example of anonymous inlines, but I think you can see it is a wildly different paradigm than OOP. FP is also frequently associate with map, reduce, and other set based iterators, generally with lambdas or anonymous inlines.
By and large FP is more common in dynamic languages, but some statically typed languages also have a pretty good go at it, for example, C# has been moving towards FP and has pulled off some pretty impressive (painful?) tricks in order to do it statically.
In my experience, OOP advocates are pretty passionate about how much they dislike FP, the code above is a good example - strong OOP guys really hate that stuff.
Drinking habits can be dangerous. You can choke on the cloth and the nuns will wonder where their clothes are.
I'd say "just teach them python", but that assumes some decent IDE exists out there to help kids make GUI driven scripts (for free).
Eclipse, I think, is one option...
In general, though, I'm glad I got over my almost decade-long prejudice against scripting languages.
PS: I don't reply to ACs.