Steve Lohr of the New York Times calls it Do-It-Yourself App Creation Software. Salon’s Dan Gillmor says it is the Hypercard for mobile development. Others have put it in a more recent context by calling it Scratch for App Development. Mike Loukides of O’Reilly wrote:
This is revolutionary; they’re not trying to lower the bar, they’re throwing it away entirely.
I’ve taught App Inventor to non-programmers for a year as part of Google’s pilot program and I can say from experience that these guys are right: App Inventor will change both how apps are created, and who creates them.
Will the bar be thrown away? Not exactly, but a lot more people can get under the bar– and past the syntax barrier that has forever kept them out– to enter the app building world. Once in there are still difficult logical and design mountains to climb, but by then your hooked. Its like the barriers to learning simple conversational French have been eliminated, so that you can immediately chat with that French woman you meet at the bar. To get the girl you have to be smart and speak some poetry at some point, but now you’re motivated, a hell of a lot more motivated than if you had to go back to Cleveland and spend a year learning how to say, “Souhaitez-vous un verre de vin”
I see App Inventor creation at three levels:
Level 0, Anyone: some simple but very useful apps. These apps make use of the high-level components provided by App Inventor (Texting, LocationSensor, TextToSpeech) but require no repeat loops or complex logic. An example is this screencast of No Text While Driving, an app designed by Daniel Finnegan, a Politics major in my class at USF.
Level 1: Anyone who likes French Accents: Apps with some sophisticated logic. This level requires some hard thinking and problem solving. The blocks language has gotten you past the syntax, but now you need to piece together some repeat loops and index variables, and maybe a nested if-else. Examples of apps at this level include the Quiz and Create a Quiz tutorials I wrote for the App Inventor site. Who can do this? Just about anyone, but here you start losing some people that just don’t want to think that hard.
Level 2.0: Apps that talk to APIs: You can get past the limitations of the visual environment by talking to back-end web services. Here you need to program in another language like Python, or know a programmer real well. App Inventor has provided a bridge with its TinyWebDB component. Basically, a programmer has to write a web service proxy that talks to the service you want and follows the App Inventor protocol. Then App Inventor programmers can create client apps that use TinyWebDB to communicate. I’ve written a few App Inventor web services using Python and App Engine, including proxies for Amazon, Yahoo Finance, and San Francisco’s NextMuniBus API (my students used this service to build their DroidMuni app with App Inventor).
The web service programming is quite simple, for a programmer. You can download one of my samples and build an App-Inventor compliant service within minutes. But the barrier is back up, big time: most people will never write web services. But I do envision the following:
- Some App Inventor programmers graduating to Python (or another language) because they are so motivated.
- Organizations providing App-Inventor-compliant APIs that App Inventor programmers can then mash.
- Collaborations, on-line or off, of App Inventor client programmers and App Inventor API builders. For instance, one of my CS 1 students worked with some CS 0 (App Inventor) students in this way to build an app using the Eventful API.
- Yahoo-Pipes-like functionality for App Inventor
Level 2.0, the bridge to “back-end code”,is the key to App Inventor’s success. Without it, App Inventor would have been a nice educational tool. With it, App Inventor will change the world of app development.
Not sure? I’m not either, but they say you should bet on the toolmaker, along with the tool. Dan Gillmor wrote this about Hal Abelson, App Inventor co-director:
a brilliant computer scientist who also understands how app development needs to get into wider distribution, not just the coder community
This statement resonates with my experience working with Hal and the team during the university pilot and this summer. They are money, and they don’t even know it. This is why I’ve thrown my hat in with App Inventor.
Filed under: api communication, what is app inventor? | Tagged: android, api, app, app inventor, tinywebd | 1 Comment »
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