MIT App Inventor Back Online

mikejuk writes "If you have been missing App Inventor, you'll be relieved to learn that it is now available again — albeit still in beta. After two months, MIT has managed to open the beta program and users can once again create App Inventor Android programs. However, you still need a Google ID to sign in, and among the known issues is the problem that MIT App Inventor cannot load projects that are as large as those supported by the Google version. It also reports that some projects have loaded with missing blocks. While the world seems to be intent on making a fuss about the educational impact of cheap hardware like Raspberry Pi, really valuable tools that could produce a new generation of programmers such as App Inventor don't seem to get the headlines or the concern due when they go missing for months."

Comments

Sick of pi

[Kell Bengal]

I'm tired of hearing about Raspberry Pi. Really sick of it. It was of mild note when it was new, but now that it's on sale I'm being bombarded by a dozen stories on various news portals. Yes, it's a cute piece of hardware, yes it's cheap. No, it's not revolutionary or game-changing. We've had plenty of SBCs in the past that do pretty much what it can do.

And the stupid thing is, I'm a robotics researcher and an electronics hobbiest to boot - I'm the target demographic for this product. But it's not solving any problem I really have, and I'm so sick of hearing about it I'm not going to buy one out of interest. Even the feeding frenzy over kinect was better than this, in that it truly was new and innovative in the robotics space (or at least, was a whole lot cheaper than the swiss ranger). The internet is weird in the things it collectively decides to care about. It's the corollary of the power of the internet - sometimes the mediocre gets amazing airtime, and sometimes the revolutionary and important falls by the wayside.