Android Inventor is RAD.

The announcement that Google was releasing a “no skills needed” tool set for creating Android applications sent shivers down my spine. Hearing it was MIT material caused a small seizure. It’s scary for us developers to find out that our introverted, caveman empires are made of straw. After all, saying you can program Android applications now means you have the same basic qualifications as Keyboard Cat.

In 1996, one of my first professional assignments was to complete the interface for a new in-surgery medical wiki. This was the golden age of Delphi, Sybase, Oracle, Java, Visual Basic, etc. It was also the period (pre-Bubbling) where new approaches to software development were supported by more and more powerful IDEs.

This wiki-style project was a first for me. I was flown out to New York City and holed up in some hotel’s conference room for two days with the main investor and his technical side-kick. We hammered out a basic UI while I took verbal abuse for my being Canadian (“eh? giggle giggle giggle”). It was intense & fun and I was remunerated handsomely. The point is, by at least 14 years ago, there was a shift towards (more) customer engagement during the definition stages of a project through Rapid Application Development (RAD). And now, we’re mobile. And now Android Inventor makes sense.

It took me a few days to rationalize my thoughts about the Inventor tool. I’m still not sure they’re rational — they’re certainly not comprehensive — but here they are:

1. Google has again raised the bar for openness and community. Openness: everybody can do. Community: everybody can judge.
2. The Android development process was already smooth albeit a bit technical.
3. Inventor is another great social experiment. FWIW: I love and use Buzz and Wave so whole-heartedly disagree with the detractors.
4. Consultants (etc) should be using Inventor at least for prototyping.
5. Inventor is the first (that I know of) RAD tool for mobile developments. So,
6. I see a great opportunity for better engagement and diversity for mobile projects.

I still have some questions about this. The main issues are:

1. Is Inventor best used for throw-away prototypes? Or better,
2. How easy is it to move from Inventor to an SDK environment? And,
3. Will the developer community embrace this tool? And from the developer’s view,
4. How modular is Inventor? How will it support and promote re-usability.

We all love lego.  Fin.

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