Scratch from MIT

MIT have made this little programming IDE called Scratch which is very similar to the Android AppInventor I blogged about last year:

It's main use is education, but it's also used for simple games programming and animation.

Adventures in Android Programming

Someone I know recently bought themselves an Android phone. This reminded me that I managed to get an early Beta of the AppInventor from Google which allows you to program the phones using a really easy user interface, so I decided to build them a simple app (they have a cat, so the app plays a purring sound or meowing sound when they click on the picture).

The AppInventor is web based but involves using a Java WebApp and an emulator, which you have to download. The designer is relatively straightforward, but it's the blocks editor which is the great bit for the programmer. Look at this:

It even clicks when you place the components. How cool is that. It's like Lego for programmers, not that most programmers don't already have Lego.