Did you ever want to turn to a manager, or someone in marketing, or just anyone who doesn’t live personally through the pain of what it takes to move an application from concept to clickability and say “If you think it’s so easy, why don’t you just do it yourself?” If you are currently employed as a developer it’s likely that you have resisted that rather career-limiting urge. Yet, dreams can come true. Google has released a tool called the “App Inventor,” which provides a drag-and-drop environment which will allow anyone who can design a slide presentation to put together an Android application.
The good news, is some of the more ridiculous application requests may take care of themselves. The bad news is that this will make for a lot of weird stuff out there in the Android application market.
App Inventor runs across platforms, which is the typical Google way. I haven’t tried it out yet, but I will soon. Maybe I’ll post some sort of weird app for you to enjoy. If you do something with it, why not upload it onto My dW and share it?
Over the holiday I got myself the Droid phone, featuring Google’s Android operating system. I’m afraid that I’ve spent the last week or so geeking out on it a little.
I’ve done the obligatory web browsing, email and social networking. Then I started to dig a little. Tonight I managed to create a key-authenticated connection to my home PC and then ran VNC through the encrypted tunnel, just like I’ve described for my other remote work. It was all but useless with such a tiny screen, but it would do for an emergency. For example, I was able to lookup a PDF and read it. If I was troubleshooting for someone it would be enough for me to look at their screen and read error messages. It’s possible to zoom and pan and such, but I think if I had to do much more I would get myself to a full-size VNC connection.
I’ve been hearing a lot of ads lately for a company that promotes the service of accessing your work computer remotely from anywhere. I’m sure that they offer some special functionality that I’m not considering, but I’ve used open-ssh technique to do the same thing through my home Internet connection. If there’s interest, I’ll put out a quick tutorial on what I did.
Monday everything begins anew. More about what’s new with me in the next entry.
Cheers!
Chris
Living and sharing the lifestyle of an open-source kinda guy.