Users of Google’s Android App Inventor were greeted today with an email from Google outlining immediate and future changes to the service.
In addition to an immediate change to the URL, Google states that by the end of the year it will no longer be supporting the service.
While your projects are safe for now, App Inventor users will need to retrieve any data that they want to save before the end of the year when MIT’s Google-funded Center for Mobile Learning will take the reins.
In case you accidentally discarded the email, here it is:
Dear App Inventor User,
As a result of the recent changes to Google Labs and App Inventor, effective immediately, the URL for App Inventor will change from appinventor.googlelabs.com to appinventorbeta.com. This URL change WILL NOT have an impact on your projects stored in App Inventor. All data that you see in your appinventor.googlelabs.com account, as well as documentation and email forums will be available at appinventorbeta.com.
As we announced on the App Inventor Announcement Forum, Google will end support for App Inventor and open source the code base at the end of this year. Additionally, in order to ensure the future success of App Inventor, Google has funded the establishment of a Center for Mobile Learning at the MIT Media Lab, where MIT will be actively engaged in studying and extending App Inventor. This transition will happen at the end of 2011. At that time you will need to download your data from appinventorbeta.com in order to continue working with it in the open source instance of App Inventor. In the coming months we will send you detailed instructions on how to download your data.
Please visit the App Inventor user forums to get future updates on App Inventor.
The App Inventor Team
© 2011 Google Inc. 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043
You have received this mandatory service announcement email to update you about important changes to your App Inventor account.
Top image by JD Hancock
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Google Labs,
Thank you for your contributions to the future of object oriented programming by reducing the redundancy in programming by the use of reusable graphical objects.
Sun’s efforts with Javabeans are further testimony to the significance of this approach, but fell short on the IDE side. Hopefully, Your contributions to the MIT Media Lab, shows unparalleled class, of how a technology company can bow out once a concept is ready for new eyes, thoughts and inspiration.
This act will undoubtedly lead to astonishing results towards advancements in computer technology as we move more and more to the factoring out of concurrency for optimum use of multi core parallel processing.
For those of us programmers whom have lost the use of our fingers and can no longer do so much typing at the speed our mind works, this is a giant leap in our ability to continue the work we love.
It would be nice to see a means put in place, such that selected objects, could at the click of a button visually see all available events and methods between the selected object and other available objects which could be subscribed to, along with a brief description box appear which can be scrolled though.. Just a concept..
Sincerely,
Robert M Backus