Google App Inventor: is drag and drop a flop?

Tuesday, September 7th, 2010

Confession time: I have never learnt to program in Java. Swoon, gasp.

It’s not that I haven’t wanted to. In particular, I’ve always loved the idea of creating my own mobile phone apps; but I’ve never seemed to find the time. So I was excited to discover at the weekend that Google has finally given me access to App Inventor — a visual development environment that lets you create Android applications via a drag-and-drop interface, with no Java skills required. (more…)

Cheeky Sun throws in OpenOffice with Java

Thursday, August 28th, 2008

Sun, which has spent the past decade constantly moaning about the worst excesses of Microsoft’s behaviour, is clearly not averse to employing underhand tactics of its own.

Having spent the past couple of days wilfully ignoring the Java update nagging away in my System Tray, I finally relented and installed the latest version, only to be confronted with the following screen:

Admittedly, Sun was only trying to force the OpenOffice installer on me, rather than automatically downloading the hundreds of megabytes that comprise the full suite. But after the furore caused when Apple automatically ticked the Safari installation with iTunes updates earlier this year, it’s amazing that companies are still resorting to such cheap tricks.

The joy of interfacing

Thursday, April 24th, 2008

So anyway, get yourself into your time machine and set it for sometime around 1986. Once you get there, pop on your invisibility cloak, find someone who looks spoddy and follow them into the dining room. See that BBC Micro in the corner? Pop over and give the top a quick tug. Chances are it’s not screwed down.

That’s because, in the old days, computers were for hobbyists with soldering irons, and they were forever taking the tops off to install new circuit boards they’d made.

Doesn’t happen much anymore, of course – you might pop the side off once a year to install a new graphics card, but most people wouldn’t consider actually building new hardware to go inside their computer. And for very good reason: the insides of a modern PC are massively more complex and to build an add-on part yourself that would actually be any use is more or less impossible.

Thing is though, designing and connecting your own hardware to a PC, while unlikely to win you admiring glances from the opposite sex, is bloody good fun. Fact. I’ve been tinkering with the whole area again for the past year or so – for reasons I may document at some point – and it turns out that there’s a massive array of components that are relatively easy to interface to a PC and do interesting things with. (more…)