Google launches open-source applications for smartphones

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July 13 2009

After Google’s YouTube video sharing service, it is now Google’s turn to allow people again to create their applications for Android smartphones.

Internet search engine Google plans to launch a free software tool (http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/about/) called Google App Inventor on Monday to let people write applications for its smartphones, media reports said.

The application, under development for a year, has been tested in schools among students that included grade schools, high schools, nursing schools and university undergraduates who are not computer science students.

Users are allowed to virtually design the form of the application using blocks to do everything with a phone and blocks for doing ‘programming-like’ stuff, blocks to store information, performing and repeating actions and even blocks to talk to micro-blogging sites like Twitter.

App Inventor project leader Harold Abelson, a MIT computer scientist on sabbatical at Google, was quoted as saying in The New York Times that the goal of developing such a tool was to enable users to become creators and not just consumers in the mobile world.

Google’s tool, which works only for phones running on Android software with a gmail sign-up required, intends to give users, especially youngsters, a simple tool to let them play with smart phone software. Its application tool for Android enables people to drag and drop blocks of code – shown as graphic images and representing different smart phone capabilities.

The software tool is web-based except for a small software download that automatically matches the programs created on a personal computer, which is connected to the application inventor website, with an Android smart phone. The phone must be connected to a computer with a USB link while making programs.

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