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by WorkerBee
5815 days ago
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Making apps is programming - you can make it more accessible, but "programming" is still a good definition of the activity. Making programs with no programming knowledge sounds about as useful as driving forklift trucks with no forklift-truck-driving-knowledge. There have been visual app generators before, for other platforms. None of them took the world by storm, and mostly were very limited and/or actually quite hard to learn - different from regular programming languages, but still with a learning curve. The devil's in the details, and a good programming language "makes easy things easy and hard things possible". App generators often succeed very well at the "makes easy things easy" part but fail at the "make hard things possible" bit. |
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On the Internet, we saw a lot of 'personal home pages' which were basically globally accessible bookmark menus.
Those had limited utility because they were public and only available when on-line.
By comparison something as 'easy' as Frontpage would be great for making a personal single-purpose app for your phone. It doesn't have to do a great deal to be useful - perhaps it would just show the RSS feed from your school events society. Maybe it would just make a ping sound when you touched the screen, or be a really simple game just for the fun of it.
If we are talking about 15 minutes of setup and build time then the apps really don't have to do much, and they only have to be useful to one person to get made. But it makes owning the phone much more interesting to people who are a bit geeky but don't code, which is important for Google.
(Compare to the iPhone - where the easiest option is to set up a web server and build a single-purpose web site. That's easy for us but for a 10 year old it's a huge barrier.)