hal's blog

Ever since App Inventor was launched, there have been many requests for a site where people can exhibit and share their App Inventor work. MIT and University of Massachusetts at Lowell are collaborating on creating such a Gallery site, which we hope to launch later this year.

Right now, we are looking for volunteer testers to provide feedback on the site and to help shake it down.

The MIT Center for Mobile Learning is delighted to announce that we’re meeting our goal of making MIT App Inventor available as a public service in the first quarter of 2012.

For the past two months, we have been conducting a closed test of the system for an increasing number of testers, and we’ve currently scaled to 5000 testers. Today, we’re taking the next step, and opening the MIT App Inventor service to everyone. All you will need is a Google ID for log-in (for example, a Gmail account).

App Inventor will now be suitable for any use, including running classes.

Are you teaching App Inventor in a course this Spring, or beginning a course soon? Then you are eligible to apply for early access to the experimental version of App Inventor at the MIT Center for Mobile Learning. Apply by filling out the form at: http://bit.ly/MitEarly

It's been three months since we started work on App Inventor at the MIT Center for Mobile Learning and three weeks since Google's public service went offline. Here's brief progress report on the replacement public service we'll be deploying at MIT.

So far (knock on wood) our development effort is on track for releasing the MIT Public App Inventor Service in the first quarter of this year. While unexpected issues can always arise, we're guardedly optimistic that people who plan to run App Inventor courses or workshops can anticipate being able to use the MIT service by mid-April.

Google and MIT are pleased to announce the initial free and open-source release from Google of the App Inventor source code at http://code.google.com/p/app-inventor-releases/.

There's little supporting documentation yet, and we’re not accepting contributions to the code now. That will happen later, after the MIT Center of Mobile Learning opens their App Inventor server to the public.

The Center for Mobile Learning is planning to deploy a public App Inventor service some time in the first quarter of 2012, to replace the service that Google will be turning off at the end of December. We've just launched an experimental prototype, and we're looking for people to help test the service. We'll start by opening the service to a small number of testers, and we'll add more testers as we gain experience over the next several weeks.

I’m happy to use this first post in our App Inventor Development Blog to announce that MIT work on App Inventor is underway, and even happier to introduce Andrew McKinney as our newly hired technical lead for the Center and for App Inventor development.  Andrew has a 20-year history of educational technology leadership at Harvard and MIT, including being lead developer on MIT’s Technology Enabled Active Learning (TEAL) physics project, which was MIT’s signature redesign of our freshman physics courses.  You’ll be hearing from Andrew in subsequent postings to this blog.
 
Right now, our top development priority at the Center is to build an App Inventor service for general public access.  This will be similar to the one Google currently runs and is planning to take offline at the end the year as announced last summer on the App Inventor Announcement Forum.