Google App Inventor Review

Android and iOS are two of the most dominant players in phone market. Both combined can take more than 50% of the phone market users. What makes them great? The community. Yes, it's the community that makes them growth over the years. People build applications for both Android and iOS-based devices and put them on Android Market and also Apple AppStore.

You can be one of them since Google and Apple opened up their SDK to developers. All you need is the study them and start building your applications and put it on their online store to be published for public. As for Android development itself, Google has created a very nice application called Google App Inventor which enables users to create Android applications from any platform (unlike Apple which is limited to Apple product users since the only tool able to build is by using XCode).

Ralph Roberts has created a very nice book called Google App Inventor and this book requires no prior experience of building Android applications. It's a perfect companion for those who wanted to learn about building applications targetting Android-based devices. It will show you how to build Android applications step by step using easy-to-understand examples and by the end of this book, you will utilize all the features available on most Android-based devices, such as GPS and sensors for your applications. Basically, it gives you all you need to know about using Google App Inventor to create magnificent products.

This book is available in Amazon, but if you want to buy the eBook version, you can visit PacktPub. You can get more discount if you buy both version (printed and ebook). Oh, for certain countries, you will also get a free shipping cost. Sounds a great deal.

While Google App Inventor development will be closed this year, in the future, it will be shifted to MIT Center for Mobile Learning and it will be ready by next year (there will be some period of time when you can't access the system during the transition), so don't worry that you will loose all what you have created using this very nice application.

If you wanted to learn about Android development, this is the first book that you should get

App Inventor Find New Home

A week ago, i posted a news that Google App Inventor will be discontinued and they were looking for a new home for the project. Well, in just seven days from that day, Google App Inventor has found a new home for their project and it's MIT Media Lab.

MIT has announced that they will make a new MIT Center for Mobile Learning, a place to learn more about mobile computing and App Inventor will be one of the sub projects that goes into this place.

This would add MIT's educational project as Scratch is also hosted at MIT. It's also another great tool for teaching students to understand about visual programming without having to fully understand basic knowledge about programming itself. It's a drag-and-drop environments which is very suitable for both the students and the lecturers/teachers.

Congratulations for App Inventor for finding a new home. Hope you like the new environments

Google AppInventor is Discontinued

Google AppInventor is designed to allow non-programmers to create Android applications by dragging, dropping and connecting blocks of code to create a complete application. It was released a year ago and it gained lots of positive reactions from many developers.

Unfortunately, Google has decided that it will discontinue App Inventor as a Google product and will open source the code. They will keep support for this project until the end of this year, but the URL will likely to be changed in the next 90 days.