I was mostly offline this weekend. This morning I read with great interest the lead story on Techmeme about Google’s upcoming App Inventor for Android.
It provides a simple looking front end and toolset to allow just about anyone to create an Android app.
To me this very much reminds me of back in the day of Hypercard where just about anyone could learn how to build a Hypercard stack. I earned a living one summer just building Hypercard apps back in undergrad.
MG raises the concern that this may lead to a volume of jenky apps since the bar is lowered. I couldn’t disagree more with this sentiment. Making things simpler is essential for innovation and new things from new entrepreneurs that couldn’t participate in a more cumbersome environment. Just a few examples to consider, things like Amazon S3 have made it easier to create and launch web services, things like modern blogging platforms allow anyone to create a blog, things like iMovie and YouTube make it easy to create works of art.
The creation generation is going to have a field day building mobile apps now and that’s wonderful.
I love the vision of App Inventor and was always hoping a startup would build something like this for iPhone and Android.