
Google’s Do-It-Yourself App Tool - asnyder
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/12/technology/12google.html
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patrickk
" _A program by a nursing student at Indiana University enabled a phone to
send an emergency message or make a call, if someone fell. It used the phone’s
accelerometer to sense a fall. If the person did not get up in a short period
or press an onscreen button, the program automatically texted or called the
person designated to receive the alert._ "

This type of simple, yet useful app sounds great. This approach to letting
'laymen' design an app to scratch their own itch opens up a whole world of
possibilities IMO. Certain apps, that could easily be developed by 'pro' app
developers, inevitably won't get built because the developer would tell
themselves "oh that's too trivial" or "no-one will use that".

By lowering the barriers to entry, Google is allowing app development to
follow the process way nature discovers the best new idea: wasting a lot of
one resource (e.g. dandelions scattering their seeds to the wind / allowing
amateurs to create a lot of crappy apps) to find a few gems (the small % of
dandelions seeds that find a suitable patch to grow / the amateur that has
great insight into a useful app, but previous lacked the technical know-how to
implement it). Just my 2c.

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hsuresh
Looks similar to MIT's Scratch <http://scratch.mit.edu/>.

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timepilot
agreed, looks like a great way to quickly hack a simple app

