I haven’t thought about Google’s App Inventor since it was thrown off Sergey and Larry’s bus this past summer. Yes, it does live on as an open source project at MIT’s Media Labs, but certainly the orphaning of AI has taken some of the wind out of its sails.
App Inventor fits somewhere between an educational tool for learning programming, with its very visually oriented jigsaw-like function blocks, and an Android app generator for small businesses.
On that latter point, I’ve watched startup companies, like Shoutem, launch instant app creation for IOS platforms, and say, Onepager offer their effortless web site builder, all with a mind towards servicing the IT needs of small businesses, for a fee.
And then I received a request to review a book on App Inventor by Packt, an e-book publisher out of the UK. I swiped through it briefly while remembering my own efforts to pull and display RSS feeds using this Googley tool, and then I thought, Inventor is actually not a bad SMB development tool.
I should add that for tech-minded SMBs App Inventor could provide inexpensive answers to some basic content distribution issues, provided there isn’t too much hair pulling required for these DIYers.
The Packt book reminded me that AI does have basic communications–email, texting, phone calls, social media– and in a chapter devoted to this subject, I discovered a few features I hadn’t known about. Something I need to look into.
I’ll write more about the book and Android Inventor’s SMB potential in another post.
Just need another long rainy/snowy Sunday afternoon.