Is Google App Inventor A Gateway Drug Or A Doomsday Device For Android?

http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/11/google-app-inventor/

by gvb • 16 years ago

28 20 16 years ago

rbanffy3• 16 years ago

It's what Visual Basic was for Windows - it allowed hordes of developers to write GUI applications for the first time.

It's both. A gateway drug and a doomsday device.

It reminds me of Scratch and Borland's ObjectVision. The educational slant is probably a preemptive strike against Microsoft's attemps to capture the higher educational market through free tools and bundles. Seems a natural move.

Indyan• 16 years ago

If its like VB for Windows, then it's still good news. But god help us if it's like Frontpage :|

rbanffy3• 16 years ago

Not sure. VB ruined a lot of programmers. I am not sure I would have survived VB if I hadn't had a proper intro to OOP with Smalltalk and Actor.

jqueryin• 16 years ago

@rbanffy, you and I are on the same page with this one. I just commented in the other section with something along the same lines:

"I saw this on twitter this morning and noticed a glaring similarity in the GUI design and that of MIT's SCRATCH programming language geared at teaching children how to program. They both utilize the concept of visually displaying code segments as "building blocks" which fit together like puzzle pieces to give a visual representation of whether or not code will work.

I commend the approach to get more parties interested in programming and mobile web application development. Perhaps this opens up a whole new world of potential for getting mobile applications development into the classroom at a very young age. On the downside, we might end up with an influx of even crappier Android applications in the market. I already have a hard enough time filtering through the crapplications as it is.

Here's the link to SCRATCH for those unaware:"

http://scratch.mit.edu/

jamesbritt2• 16 years ago

'They both utilize the concept of visually displaying code segments as "building blocks" which fit together like puzzle pieces to give a visual representation of whether or not code will work.'

Sounds like Lego Mindstorms as well.

giantfuzzypanda• 16 years ago

Things like Lego Mindstorms help kids move on to the next step - maybe Visual Basic or Python. No one starts off with programming, it's usually WYSIWYG or similar paradigms.

pavs• 16 years ago

Is Techcrunch a sensationalist tabloid or last bastion of quality journalism?

rbanffy3• 16 years ago

Yes

commandar• 16 years ago

Techcrunch is Gawker for people interested in startups.

Incidentally, this quote from Nick Denton applies to TC as much as it does Gawker:

“We don’t seek to do good. We may inadvertently do good. We may inadvertently commit journalism. That is not the institutional intention.”

http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/07/with-ad-revenue-up-35-gawke...

ekidd• 16 years ago

What a shiny toy! I always loved Basic, Logo, Apple's old Cocoa programming language (the visual app creator, not the framework), and Lego Mindstorms. Some of these environments were better for actual hacking than others, but they were all amusing.

It saddens me to see such a cool toy presented in terms of platform politics, and to see people arguing that allowing more people to write dodgy programs is _bad_. My goodness, I personally wrote a lot of dodgy programs back in school.

paulgb2• 16 years ago

I agree. As much as people complain about what Visual Basic did for application development, to a fifth-grader the ability to create a GUI with a mouse is pretty cool.

Rhapso• 16 years ago

Visual Basic got me into programming in middle-school. The way you suck the children in, is to give them a tool like this, with almost instant efficacy, it allows them to grasp that their ideas can be made real, and that it is not as impossible as they might have thought, then you should promptly give them a problem that VisualBasic/Scratch/Inventor cannot solve.

jackowayed• 16 years ago

Doomsday Device? Really Techcrunch? Because all of those WYSIWYG sites were doomsday devices for the web, right?

It's not like the app store (on Android or iOS) is currently composed of nothing but spectacular apps. Most of the apps in both app stores are pretty crappy.

Recommendation is already a very important way that people find apps. I had an iPhone for a year, and I basically never blindly searched the app store. Maybe for a magic 8-ball app. But all the major apps I used were recommended to me by friends with iPhones, mentioned on some blog I read, etc.

And even people that I know that occasionally browse apps browse the "top" pages, which filters out the crap (more-or-less).

Also, it's Google that helped people sort through the crap on the web. If it really becomes a problem, I'm sure they have some people who could develop algorithms to make the good Android apps rise to the top of searches.

nnash• 16 years ago

The android market is a much smaller ecosystem than the web. If most of the apps there are already useless, as the writer says, this will just exacerbate the problem.

greg7gkb• 16 years ago

Oh God. Let the crapstorm begin...

jwhitlark• 16 years ago

Actually, I see two very important use cases that don't seem to be coming up.

1) This should allow devs to get to something resembling a MVP quickly to validate a new idea.

2) I think this will make android the preferred platform for mobile vertical apps., the kind of one-off solutions that are not profitable to bigger players.

elblanco• 16 years ago

It could make for an excellent live interface prototyping tool as well.

Is Google App Inventor A Gateway Drug Or A Doomsday Device For Android?

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