On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 6:45 AM, Kevin Cole <[email protected]> wrote: > http://feeds.arstechnica.com/~r/arstechnica/index/~3/fgfvtXF_2a8/google-demos-codeless-android-development-tool-for-students.ars > Google has announced a new browser-based visual development tool called App > Inventor that allows users to create Android applications without having to > write any code. It appears to be aimed primarily at students. App Inventor > enables user interface design with a simple drag-and-drop layout system. The > behavior of the user interface elements can be programmed via a visual > development system that the user manipulates by organizing blocks with > specific programming characteristics into various structures. The blocks can > be dragged around and snapped into each other to form relatively > sophisticated programs. This aspect of App Inventor is based on Scratch, an > MIT visual programming language. The compiler that translates the blocks > into Android bytecode is built on top of the GNU Kawa framework, which > provides a Scheme-based intermediate language. It's worth noting that Kawa > can also be used standalone to build entire Android applications with > Scheme. We were not able to test App Inventor ourselves because it is still > in closed beta and is not broadly available to the general public yet. If > you want to try it yourself, you will have to register on the Google Labs > website and wait for approval. For more details, see the official > introduction and demo video. Read the comments on this post
It appears very interesting. Unfortunately, the ripped out a lot of the interesting StarLogo stuff: http://education.mit.edu/drupal/starlogo-tng ...and replaced with Android-specific user interface elements. One could do roughly the same thing with GTK elements to make a Sugar Activity builder. Most of the hard work is already done w/ the OpenBlocks framework: http://education.mit.edu/drupal/openblocks It's a shame the framework is written in Java, which isn't the most Sugar-friendly language. --scott -- ( http://cscott.net/ ) _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) [email protected] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
