This post was published 1 year 10 months 12 days ago which may make its actuality or expire date not be valid anymore. This site is not responsible for any misunderstanding.

The App Store has become renowned (and more than a little infamous), for the fact that you can find an application there to do ANYTHING on an iPhone. Learn to Yodel in Bantu? There’s an App for that. Put smurf hats on everyone in your family snaps? App for that too. For every really useful application in the App Store, there are two examples of useless tat.

Now that the Android market is growing up, our new Google overlords have decided that it just isn’t growing fast enough to satisfy demand and honor in the face of the rivalry with Apple. Therefore, Google is not forcing you to rely on faceless developers for your useless, but they are letting Android uses create Apps for themselves with an easy to use construction tool called App Inventor…and who knows, maybe some of those really useful programs will come about too.

Using simple building blocks App Inventor allows you to create an App to your own specifications, to suit your exact needs. It can be as simple or as complex as you wish, since you will have access to lots of advanced features such as GPS location and text-to-voice.

As reported in the New York Times…

A student at the University of San Francisco, Mr. Abelson said, made a program that automatically replied to text messages, when he was driving. “Please don’t send me text messages,” it read. “I’m driving.”

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.

“These aren’t the slickest applications in the world,” Mr. Abelson said. “But they are ones ordinary people can make, often in a matter of minutes.”

The Google tool, of course, works only for phones running Android software. A sign-up with a Google Gmail account is required. The tool is Web-based except for a small software download that automatically syncs the programs created on a personal computer, connected to the application inventor Web site, with an Android smartphone. When making programs, the phone must be connected to a computer with a U.S.B. link.

Personally I think this is an incredible step for Google to take, and it reminds me of the sorts of things we were encouraged to do with BASIC back at the dawn of PCs. It is very likely that the App Inventor can become this generation’s “Hello World”, as smartphones and mobile platforms hold the same allure that desktop PCs did for my generation. Initiatives like this is what changes a certain amount of people from consumers to producers, or at least helps people understand how their technology actually works, which is never a bad thing.

Check out the App Inventor in action in the following video.