Make my App

Yes,  by now most people know that Google's appinventor is now officially released to public in beta. As expected of a high tech company, Google's vision with the appinventor is to provide Android users to divulge in making their own apps and use it on their phone. While still in beta the appinventor holds great promise for the future of Android Operating System and the rate at which Android apps will rapidly proliferate and carve a niche market. 

appinventor

To start working with the app inventor the user needs to log into Gmail account and can jump directly to creating apps. Not needing to write even a single line of code may sound like a bliss, there is a slight learning curve to designing app. A designer still has to abstract the functionality and understand the function blocks to design the logic behind the app. So a little effort is required by going  through all the tutorials and reference materials to be a cognizant user.

My first impression after using the appinventor was that the functional blocks are arranged in a very logical way via a simple toolbar interface making it relatively easy to simply drag-and-drop blocks. Simply sated making a simple app was simply fun.

To get started, there are mainly two GUI tools; the block designer and the blocks editor.The Block designer specifies the UI components which is required to interact with the user like buttons, labels and media options (i.e. visible components). A separate set of non visible components are also placed in the block designer which provide the underlying features to the app like data persistency and accessing various phone sensors etc.

Once provided with the blocks, the Blocks editor fires up on your machine where we can play with the functionality of each block and make the logic of the app. To test your finest creation the app user needs to jack his android phone to the computer and transfer the package a.k.a. app to his phone. 

While the appinventor is a great piece of software their is still a lot to be desired. Like making the apps available on the android market, more sophisticated user interface design options and access to lower level API's and which are only available in the programming environment. 

It will be interesting to see how Google plays the appinventor card and give its competitors a run for its money, clearly the minds behind appinventor have high expectations with this project and that is to get some serious apps for the Android user base. The potential to play around with logic blocks reminds me how LEGO had such a appeal for children to make their own creation. For most novice programers this software might actually flesh out some serious ideas which may never even come out of the concept stage if it had to be done by computer programming. 

Presently, the target user base for Google seem to be experienced software developers/veterans and college students who are taking up Android app design courses. The forum is bombarded with questions about crashes and problems due to a lot of bugs fixing needs to be done to deliver the best development tool experience, we can expect at least a year for the appinventor to catch up to other Google's suite of products.

I will conclude this article with the below video for readers to ponder over Google's latest offering and perhaps one of its finest yet.

Be sure to check back regularly for updates. You can e-mail me at 'milleniumsalman@gmail.com' for any queries or leave me a comment.