Communications of the ACM
Google's Do-It-Yourself App Creation Software
Google is bringing Android software development to the masses.
The company will offer a software tool, starting Monday, that is intended to make it easy for people to write applications for its Android smartphones.
The free software, called Google App Inventor for Android, has been under development for a year. User testing has been done mainly in schools with groups that included sixth graders, high school girls, nursing students and university undergraduates who are not computer science majors.
The thinking behind the initiative, Google said, is that as cellphones increasingly become the computers that people rely on most, users should be able to make applications themselves.
"The goal is to enable people to become creators, not just consumers, in this mobile world," said Harold Abelson, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who is on sabbatical at Google and led the project.
From The New York Times
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