Google needs all the help it can get trying to catch the 200,000 app lead that the iPhone has set up and while it’s doing fine, it thinks it can also harness a secret source ‘ developers who can’t actually program.
The offering is called the App Inventor suite of applications, which allows non-programmers to build applications for Android Market.
The technology is all pretty much open source and relies on the Open Blocks Java Library and runs on a compiler based on the Kawa Language Framework, which came out of the Gnu Operating system.
There have been automated programming tools which offer to turn simple commands into working programs for at least 30 years to our knowledge, but they are mostly made up from myth and hype and rarely have worked. But even if App Inventor requires a little hard work, some thought and some learning, it is a powerful step which may add piles of enthusiasts to the rising tide of Android developers. Most of the iPhone Apps are being repurposed to Android and a few also to other operating systems including Symbian.
Google says that App Inventor can give birth to apps anywhere from games like WhackAMole to drawing apps and that it offers access to all the phones’ sensors, like the accelerometers, as well as GPS and Google Maps. It also cites Quiz apps and the in-built text-to-speech capabilities.
Google insists that App Inventor users do not need to be developers and require NO programming knowledge. Instead of writing code, they design the app look and feel and use blocks (skeleton programs) to specify the app’s behavior.
The App Inventor team has created blocks for just about everything including to store information, repeat actions or perform actions only under certain conditions. There are also blocks to talk to services like Twitter.
Google says that App Inventor also provides a way to communicate with the web so that a web programmer can write Android apps which talk to their favorite web sites.