A while back Google showcased a tool that would allow people to easily create applications for their Android applications with no knowledge of programming. In the early stages, the new tool was made available to people only if they signed up for it.
Now Google has opened AppInventer to everyone with a Google account, and those interested can gain access easily through Google Labs. Check out a video of AppInventer in action:
AppInventer is an online tool for creating Android applications. Using an entirely browser-based tool you can create the UI of your Android application by dragging and dropping components. This works pretty much like any other GUI creation application such as Visual Studio or QtCreator, however, in AppInventer, the programming of you application is done visually as well.
You can interconnect the components you add in the AppInventer design interface and program the functionality of your application using a Blocks Editor. This part of AppInventer is a Java application, and doesn’t run in your browser. For more information about AppInveter, you can check out our feature on the application. Since we took a look at Google seems to have added a lot more blocks in the designer.
AppInventer can even connection directly to your Android phone and can can debug applications from your phone. If you have the Android SDK installed, you can use that to test and debug your applications in Android running on a VM without requiring an Android phone.
While most people interested in AppInventer would have already signed up for it, with this feature now available to all, we should see some even more interesting applications for it. Some are mentioned in Google’s blog post announcing the availability of App Inventer in labs.