Google App Inventor

Had great fun with Google App Inventor over the weekend. Got my beta invite and was able to do wysiwyg interface design and program creation with my app live updating to the phone. It has a very similar programming interface to Scratch, the program from MIT designed to teach programming to kids. I had been playing with Scratch and others with my 5 year old son, and had been disappointed to hear that Apple yanked a Scratch clone from the iPhone because they don't want any other mechanisms for creating apps other than Objective C.

Would be nice if App Inventors layout interface were as good as interface builder for iPhone in the Xcode, and would be great if you could see the java code that was compiled from the Scratch visual programming. Would be interesting to see if I could use this in the mobile programming class I will teach in the Spring ...

So, great fun, although I still think there could be an easier programming interface that would work well for even younger children. Seems to me that you could be able to do things like move sprites and then capture that activity in a macro format, that would then show up as a procedure that could be manipulated. Maybe Google will open source appinventor and then something like that could be created ...