Google Leaves App Inventor In Limbo 114
theodp writes "Google took some heat for pulling the plug on App Inventor for Android, but all was good with the announcement that App Inventor would live on at MIT. But try to run the App Inventor Java test today and you'll be told that 'as of December 31, 2011, Google ended support of App Inventor', even though the Google-funded Center for Mobile Learning at the MIT Media Lab won't be able to provide a large scale App Inventor service for general public access until 'sometime in the first quarter of 2012.' Until then, schools offering App Inventor classes and others who desire continued access to the easy-to-use mobile development environment are advised to try to run their own App Inventor Services on Google App Engine using MIT's test JAR files, a seemingly daunting task, especially considering App Inventor's target audience. Any thoughts on why Google would unplug the old system before the new one was ready?"
Because (Score:2, Insightful)
They're evil?
Re:Because (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You get what you pay for.
No you don't; you get what you have a contract for and can afford the lawyers to enforce* as long as it costs less than paying the penalties in the contract. We've already had one of these stories today, where it was mentioned that Microsoft provides guarantees. That's not entirely true (they provide guarantees for windows; not for some other products; different ones for different people etc. etc); but for the most part most of the serious IT vendors, Microsoft included, do things like:
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"You get what you pay for."
No you don't; you get what you have a contract for and can afford the lawyers to enforce* as long as it costs less than paying the penalties in the contract.
The phrase is normally "You TEND to get what you pay for." It's a rule of thumb rather than an absolute. As individuals we rarely or never bring lawyers into it, so whilst you're right, your version isn't much use except in business to business deals.
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The phrase is normally "You TEND to get what you pay for." It's a rule of thumb rather than an absolute. As individuals we rarely or never bring lawyers into it, so whilst you're right, your version isn't much use except in business to business deals.
As individuals we use the government to do our lawyering. That makes it very scary to lose control of the government to the companies. Compare, for example, the fact that all products in the EU have to be supported for free for two years from sale whilst in the US you always have to pay for extended warranties or the fact that in the EU the price you pay is the price on the label (including VAT) whilst in the US the price is deceptive and for example always excludes sales tax.
There are special consumer
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So how much warning did we get about the end of Windows Mobile again? Plays For Now? Zune? Kin?
None. Business decisions were made, losses were cut, and the corporations deployed PR flacks, spin doctors, and social media twits to smooth over the end-user ill will. No big story there. That's how it's done: now, then, and probably for a long time to come.
We draw attention to it when Google does it because of that company's smug stance of "doing no evil" and pretense that they are somehow more morally upright
Re:Because (Score:5, Informative)
Your Windows Mobile, Zune or Kin device keeps working today. What's ended is "support", which doesn't preclude you from keeping using it. But when Google pulls the plug, it's just gone - the wonders of online services.
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I badly hate you for forcing me to post this link supporting Microsoft. If you are a troll or a Microsoft shill, I bow down to your powers; we are not worthy of you (your posting history shows remarkable re. Anyway; here goes;
Windows Mobile is still supported; Microsoft's lifecycle page [microsoft.com] gives its end of mainstream support as August 2013 which means that if a serious security bug becomes widespread they will still "have to" fix it. According to Microsoft's support policy you even have a minimum of a fu
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PlayForSure initially had four months notice of closure, but Microsoft bowed to pressure and changed it to 3½ years. After that time you could still use the music that had been authorised already, but you could not play it on new machines. It was not the immediate cutoff that you imply, but it is still a good cautionary tale about DRM.
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Windows Mobile is still supported and will be until 2013
Plays for sure is a certification program... not really sure how that's relevent to a discussion about product/service EOL.
Zune is still alive and thriving on Xbox, PC, and Windows Phone.
Kin... not sure there were enough users to care about the kin cancelation.
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Whoah! I better hurry up and backup my mail before they pull the plug on that one too!
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For critical systems I only trust myself.
I trust everything I have physical control over and have up to date backups/mirrors of to not stop working the next day. Which pretty much rules out that I would ever trust any "cloud" services that are not offered in an technical identical way by multiple companies.
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google does stuff for free
Never thought nor did I ever insinuate that Google does stuff for free.. clown.
Google is an advertising company. They sell ads. They target you with the ads they sell based on they info the collect from you. They do not sell your information to third parties as you would like to have people believe. I guess you don't watch digital cable either because they collect data from you to "enhance" their commercials per region.
So what the hell are you going to do when Microsoft 'migrates' you to their cloud s
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What if? What if the dog didn't stop to have a shit? It would have caught the rabbit. But you ask, what does that have to do with Microsoft migrating everything to the cloud? Everything. Because Microsoft hasn't migrated everything to the cloud, so it's not relevant either. That is, you're begging the question. And for what it's worth I don't think they will ever migrate everything over. There are too many companies out there that would stop buying their products if they did. They don't want to share their
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Re:Because (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, because open sourcing and handing over a project to an institute of higher learning where the basic components of that project were developed is a sign of true pure evil.
Or, you know, a company making a business decision that supports FOSS. Whichever way Slashdot is leaning today.
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Funny how some people seem to think that if we don't all subscribe to the same groupthink that we all must be lost and directionless. Good stuff there.
Re:Because (Score:5, Insightful)
What about this makes them evil? They are entitled to withdraw a service, that doesn't make them evil at all. Just because the third party replacement service isn't ready doesn't oblige them to do anything.
Re:Because (Score:5, Funny)
What about this makes them evil?
Nothing. It does make them stupid though. You'd think they'd want as many apps as they can get (and young minds learning their platform). Developers, Developers, Developers!
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It doesn't make them evil. It makes everyone doing the "Oh, the Cloud is the future" dance look stupid, though.
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For god's sake people take a soundbite and make of it what they will.. Google only said "we will do no weavil".. not "do no evil" peoples expectations are just waay to high.
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You're an idiot. "Evil" is things like crushing free speech, putting profits over human rights, etc. "Evil" is not shutting down a product.
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"Evil" is things like crushing free speech,
Google does that too [wikipedia.org].
In Germany and France, a study reported that approximately 113 White Nationalist, Nazi, anti-semitic, radical Islamic and other websites had been removed from the German and French versions of Google.
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They were required by law to do that, otherwise they'd have to stop offering their services in France and Germany.
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And showing the middle finger [slashdot.org] clearly broke laws!
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Yet the made a big deal about Chinese government trying to censor them. But I guess that's totally different!
So your argument is that Google is evil because they chose to follow the law when it came to removing some material (" White Nationalist, Nazi, anti-semitic, radical Islamic and other websites"), but tried to circumvent it when it came to censoring the Chinese people?
There's a lot of evil shit that goes on in this world... I guess ignorance is bliss...
Re:Because (Score:5, Informative)
Why don't you quote the rest?
"Google has complied with these laws by not including sites containing such material in its search results. However, Google does list the number of excluded results at the bottom of the search result page and links to Chilling Effects for explanation."
To put it shortly: out of 57634762346346 sites google was legally forced to remove 113 sites from the index and despite this you can still learn what URLs had the removed sites from the takedown notices.
Doesn't sound evil to me.
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"Evil" also include things like frickin' sharks with frickin' "laser" beams attached to their frickin' heads.
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Actually, Microsoft were the big tech villain of the time. When Google announced the "Do no evil" policy, it was pretty clear it meant "we won't do business by dirty tricks like Microsoft do."
But I agree, simply discontinuing a product isn't evil. Annoying to users of that product certainly, but not evil.
Re:Because (Score:4, Informative)
They're evil?
I wouldn't call continually starting projects they have no intention of finishing evil. It is more like the corporate version of ADD. People ask me why I dont use more Google services even though I have an android phone. Unless a google service is funded by an external entity, you never know if it is going to be around once you start to rely on it.
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No, you're evil.
Remember that handful of pennies you gave away to a stranger that one day?
That was me. You discontinued your service against my will, and by your own words that makes you an evil person.
I demand you behave as you expect from others. You must continue this service you once did, until I have tens of thousands of your dollars in hand. Only then will you raise above evil and it be possible to be both a good person and to stop being a hypocrite.
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they were ass pennies
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At least they can spell.
Oh yes?? You do know that Google's own name is a misspelling of a very large number? Seldom has a pedant been so completely and utterly wrong.
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At least they can spell.
Oh yes?? You do know that Google's own name is a misspelling of a very large number? Seldom has a pedant been so completely and utterly wrong.
They could get a trademark on Google.
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They could get a trademark on Google.
oh yeah??
If you have a better source, the internet wants to know.
Oracle (Score:3, Funny)
or... (Score:3, Informative)
Bad mental image (Score:5, Funny)
The moment I read the headline, I got a mental image of "Google" scientists playing limbo with some guy and when they had him bent over backwards, they trapped him. Sorry... that's just weird... sorry about that.
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and reading your comment i was thinking of Google scientists playing Limbo with real people
*watch for the bear trap*
The Usual (Score:2)
Greed & Power.
Corporations don't do anything that isn't based on one or the other.
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Neither do individuals.
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A handful of them may be rotten to the core, but most of them are good.
What is "good" is relative depending on culture/religion. The hijackers who flew a plane into the twin towers thought they were doing good. A good portion of the world would probably disagree, but "good" can't be measured by popular vote either. From my (obviously pessimistic) point of view, a large number of people are NOT good, and there are very few who are. Again, just my opinion, but I agree with GP.
Not Surprising (Score:4, Insightful)
This is not surprising at all. What is surprising is that they gave advanced notice. Google doesn't lay down any timelines or plans for any of their schtuff. They invent it, put it out there and at some point, turn it off. How can you expect them to keep things running when they seldom even write documentation for the stuff they have out there? If they do write documentation it is released way after the release of new features and often right before a new release nullifies that documentation.
Google's view is it's ours so we will or won't support it at our whim.
Google Leaves App Inventor In Limbo (Score:5, Informative)
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or Health or CodeSearch or ...
heck if Android no longer is part of their nearly 100% ad-revenue backed business, watch them drop it like its hot...
I trust my email to google, I use youtube, I use search. I refuse to use the same account for more than one service. I wish I didn't have to trust them for any of those, but they frankly provide the best solutions...
Because Google doesn't really care (Score:5, Insightful)
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What about if the free service will help make them money? There a lot of instances that if you nuke a free service you will hurt your bottom line, so that statement it's not really true "If you truly care about something, pay for it from a provider who has a financial interest in keeping your business".
Also, only because it is important to you, it's not necessary important to the company you pay money to. If you really care about something, do it yourself or rely on a trully open source product with a goo
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old man yells at cloud (Score:3)
heh - slash should grab^Hlicense that grandpa simpson cartoon clip where he yells at the cloud.
(shakes fist) "damn you, cloud!"
each time I see someone trusting a 'cloud service' I think of that simpsons image. can't help it anymore, so might as well just associate any cloud-based story with that icon. text is actually optional as the image tells all you really need to know.
Google Leaves App Inventor In Limbo (Score:2)
Obviously... (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems obvious to me, that they are blatantly ignoring your sense of entitlement.
How dare Google for having the unbridled audacity to not keep their free experimental service and software project fully maintained and supported 100% of the time after donating it to the MIT Media Lab, until the Media Lab was able to deploy their service.
Sure, it could be a bit frustrating if you were a heavy user of it, but at the same time is it really fair to criticize them for not being quite generous enough and on your terms?
How about Bootstrap? (Score:1)
It's a shame that AppInventor is having a rocky transition, and I'm definitely hopeful that it will emerge intact over at MIT.
In the meantime, I'd recommend that teachers check out Bootstrap [www.BootstrapWorld.org] for their classes. It's a full-blown curriculum that teaches kids to program their own videogames using *purely algebraic* concepts. It's a nice way of reinforcing math skills though programming, and it lives entirely in the cloud! Anyone with a web browser can write, run and share programs with
Because it's crap? (Score:3)
Because App 'Inventor' is a pile of steamy crap?
No, really. Designing a mobile application is a tad more complex than just throwing together a few storyboards. And those apps that do fine just by somebody throwing together a few storyboards are simply not worth having.
A stepping stone (Score:3)
And those apps that do fine just by somebody throwing together a few storyboards are simply not worth having.
If this were true, then "Google Leaves App Inventor In Limbo" would be a non-story. For example, The Register wouldn't have reported on it [theregister.co.uk]. Let me put it another way: Even if having the "hello world" type apps that beginning computer science students come up with are not worth having, isn't the ability to create them worth having so that said students can eventually proceed to make worthwhile apps?
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I'm sort of curious if you've ever actually tried to use app inventor to do anything interesting. Because as an educational platform [mit.edu], or a place for young adults to learn about software [mit.edu], or a way to give youth a voice using digital storytelling [youthradio.org], it seems to do pretty well.
It's not the most flexible platform, but it is surprising (a) how much you can do with it and (b) how much creativity you can harness when you have a platform that's approachable by neophyte programmers with good ideas.
App Inventor Classes!? (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe these "schools" who offered "classes" in App Inventor should first have someone on hand who knows enough about computers to get the service up and running.
And maybe, just MAYBE they should have had that all set up already, considering they're (presumably) charging money for the class.
What's next classes on Minecraft? Oh wait... [arstechnica.com]
Relying on Google (Score:2, Interesting)
Dupe! Dupe! Dupe! (Score:3)
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by itself neither story would be much of a story, but because they're happening at the same time they're a story - and also the story about google doing little face-lifting on google.com. sure, it would have been nice of slashdot to combine them all into one I suppose.
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No, that era isn't over. This is what it's like when you run bunch of beta projects. Some live and some die to make room for new things. With 60M+ users I don't thing Google+ is going anywhere any time soon.
If it doesn't have ads, it's going away. (Score:5, Interesting)
Assume that any Google service that doesn't have ads is going away. They've discontinued everything from the Google search API to Google Scholar. Wikipedia has a full list [wikipedia.org], from Google Aardvark to Google Web Accelerator. Most of the no-revenue services are already gone.
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as far as I know google scholar is still alive and well... http://scholar.google.com/ [google.com]
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as far as I know google scholar is still alive and well...
It certainly is — for me, it's the fourth item on the main Google page's More menu, between Finance and Blogs — and it's often tied in with many institutions' own journal licensing setups. For example, when I'm at work, GS will find stuff in my local academic library specially and will provide links directly to the full text of articles on the sites of journals (which are definitely paywalled; I don't intend to debate whether that's right, but it's how it is). By contrast, when I search from hom
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My impression is that Web Toolkit (or as most people call it, GWT) is quite heavily used by lots of people. I guess if they made it a for-pay framework, at least the company I work for and several others would simply shell out (given the price is in the four-figure league) instead of rolling their own.
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Well, no. They haven't discontinued Google Scholar. They have deprecated the Google Web Search API in favor of the newer Google Custom Search API.
It is less than full (it excludes things like the Google Web Search API), redundant (e.g., Google Desktop is listed at least twice), and misleading (a number of products are listed as discontinued which continued but which were renamed or merged into other produc
'Cause Google's attention span shorter than MS's (Score:2)
Seriously. Microsoft and Google can't seem to stop abandoning new technologies. Oh yeah, they'll continue to be "supported" (wink, wink). Sure makes me want to invest my time in the latest whiz-bang language/API/Framework/etc.
MIT had time to set it up (Score:4, Insightful)
Google announced the dropping of App Inventor months ago. And it was announce in August that MIT was taking it over.
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/11/08/16/2048207/app-inventor-continues-life-at-mit [slashdot.org]
So, why is the story about Google dropping a service, and not about MIT properly preparing their service?
Especially if classes were being prepared for this, you would think that MIT would have gotten things up and running in 3 months. Or, were they just relying on Google to keep it up for another year?
So set it up yourself (Score:3)
seemingly daunting task, especially considering App Inventor's target audience
What the fuck is a school trying to teach the use of App Inventor for if the teachers can't do something as basic as set it up?
It might not be entirely straightforward but pretending to teach people how to write software while knowing fuck all about it yourself is disingenuous and borderline fraudulent.
Forgive my utter lack of sympathy.
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Note: I didn't read the 'daunting task' thing. But, still, you are dead wrong.
Instructors are not, in general, required to know the inside workings of anything underlying the thing they are teaching about.
Car analogy: Driving instructors are NOT required to know how to a) build, b) completely repair a car. They are now really even required to know the inner workings of said cars. They just teach you how to drive the thing. Ask any "normal" driving instructor how Torsen works, or how a common-rail diesel eng
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I expect a physics teacher to know more about physics than the syllabus covers. I expect a foreign language teacher to be conversationally fluent. I expect an English Lit teacher to know how to construct poems, stories and books.
I expect someone teaching programming to be able to be able to at the very least install and configure software.
You may argue that the App Inventor is teaching how to use a graphical tool to make apps. For the people using it that may well be the case, but for the person teaching it
Problems unforeseen and otherwise (Score:5, Informative)
Relevant: http://appinventoredu.mit.edu/faq-app-inventor-transition-mit [mit.edu]
I've been involved with the App Inventor community for a while; anyone who has been using AAI has known this time was coming. The hard deadline was set by Google a while back, the target from MIT was to get an analogue to the appinventorbeta.com service up and running by 12/31. They're a little short of that goal for a few important reasons.
Most importantly, the original App Inventor engine (at google) ran on top of google-proprietary internals. That is to say, it was not possible to spin out the App Inventor backend (which handles building and packaging an APK file from the blocks program) onto MIT servers without doing what amounted to a complete rewrite to enable it to run on App Engine. Google supported this effort and handed it off to MIT, who have been working hard to get an up-and-running system ASAP. As for right now:
If you absolutely rely on App Inventor, you can now run your own parallel instance of the backend by deploying the system as linked in the OP. This works nicely, because now the system is completely under your control (and you can hack it if you choose). This is useful for people teaching classes that use AAI as a platform (as I will be doing later this semester), but isn't so great for hobby programmers.
If you want something that runs like the old appinventorbeta.com site, allowing you to write apps but not have to worry about putting up your own backend server, wait a few weeks. There will be something up on appinventoredu.mit.edu fairly soon.
The reason why this transition is taking so long is nothing so nefarious as Google or MIT being evil or bad citizens. It's simple, really: there's not that many people actually doing coding for the project, and there's been a lot of coding to do. It'll be out soon. Patience, young apprentices.
App Inventor isn't going away, and as a matter of fact, the list of new features and useful extensions that are targeted for the coming few years is exciting and compelling.
lol (Score:2)
if people spent as much time fixing bugs as they do ranting on slashdot...
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Those who can, do. Those who can't, post.
App Inventor sort of reminds me of Sun's long abandoned Java Studio, which was supposed to let you create Java UI apps by drag and drop. Died a well-deserved death.
Cloud services (Score:2)
Bitten once again.
yes i know it was free, and its Google's right.. but it still shows that you cant trust something you don't have in your own grubby little hands.
The punchline: (Score:2)
Is that App Inventor is the brainchild of Professor Hal Abelson, not exactly somebody who deserves another slap in the face from Google.
Don't know who Professor Abelson is? Do some reading, kids. [codequarterly.com]
Free alone doesnt pay the bills (Score:2)
Some "free" brings people in for other services, much like a drug dealer. Or giving away 'free' programing tool kits that only run on your pay cloud. Or 'free' services that are covered in advertisements.
But if its just 'out there' and has no possible revenue source, then its nothing but an experiment and subject to vanish at any moment and should not be relied on.
Cat Button Apps (Score:1)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=8ADwPLSFeY8 [youtube.com]
At least if it is with MIT, then some people with brains will be creating somewhat usefull apps.
test (Score:1)