NineZeroNine

With the release of the Android OS back in 2008, I never would have guessed Android would be sitting on a 43% market share in 2010. Everyone at 909 has an Android phone and I have had my HTC Hero for about a year and a half.

One thing that Google has done is made a web/java based App Inventor for Android devices. I think the current version only works with phones but with the recent release of Google TV (review coming soon) and the upcoming release of Chromium OS, you could only speculate that Google would adapt this software for these new products. I was invited as a beta tester a few months ago to use the App Inventor but I had no idea what I would use it for. I poked around and did the standard Hello World program but I didn’t touch it again until today. Today I was emailed by the Google team telling me that they had released the App Inventor for everyone and since I had kind of forgotten about it I decided to check it out. I knew just what I was going to make. My girlfriend has been taking American Sign Language classes for almost two years now and is very fluent so when I go with her to different deaf culture events I am completely lost. She tries to teach me but it doesn’t stick. So after about 30 minutes of messing around with tutorials and reading documentation I started work on my “ASL Quizzer”. I took a library of sign pictures and imported them into the App Inventor, plugged away for another 30 minutes or so and after only two compiles later I had a working quizzer. I was super excited on how easy it was. There is very little code to write, most of it is click and drag. I have used the Android SDK with Eclipse to create an app and from what I can tell this program can handle most lower level stuff and even has some higher level things that I didn’t really mess with.

While it is very unique and takes some getting used to, I think it is a wonderful tool. With maybe another half hour or so I could definitely polish this application and stick it in the marketplace. (Of course I would have to get permission from the creator of the images I stole) The idea though is Google has made it insanely easy to create applications, you don’t need to run a special OS and you don’t have to purchase an SDK.