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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
Democratizing app building, empowering kids, women, and underrepresented groups
So simple, even a woman can do it.
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."
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
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.
False. Like most tools like this it is simple but inflexible. There are lots of things that you can do with it but it's nonsense to say "... build just about any android app you can imagine"
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
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
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.
Maybe someone should tell him. I'm sure he can make this right.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
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.
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/
How is this different from *any other software development,* ever, in history? If you want to program effectively for a platform, you need to have a computer running that platform. Want to program for Windows? Go buy a windows box. Want to program for Linux? Build or buy a PC and load Linux on it. What's that? You have a Windows box already? Great, then either: 1) turn it into a hackintosh; or 2) consider whether or not the money / knowledge you'll get in return for programming on iOS or Mac OS X will be worth that $699 hardware purchase. If it is, buy the hardware and quite whining. If it isn't keep programming for Windows, Linux, WebOS, WP7, and Android on your Windows/Linux system.
For my money, if I wanted an all-purpose programming system, I would actually go out and buy a mac. Then I'd load VMware on it, and install Win7 and Ubuntu or Red Hat as guest operating systems, and set up dev environments for all of the platforms I intended to build software for, all on a single system, so I can easily move from one to the other.
that the children on the internet were all undercover FBI agents?
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 don't see the fashion industry trying to lure more men into the business.
The University of Washington's School of Education announced, quite a few years ago, it was going to preferentially admit men to the program in an attempt to address the longstanding gender skew of the teaching force. They were forced to backtrack (and even apologize!) pretty quickly - women really got up in arms over the proposal.
#DeleteChrome
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.
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