Time will tell, but the team over at Google is doing their darnedest to help empower anyone with the desire (not necessarily the skill) to create their own Android apps.
Their new “App Inventor” is a product that’s been in development for more than a year, and promised to bring Android development capabilities to the masses. Check-out the info they’ve already made available, and watch the video for a quick overview:
Over the years, I’ve managed to migrate all of our our operations to “the cloud,” using web-based applications, as opposed to their desktop elders.
As I’ve written before (and preached to our clients), the benefits are numerous… No more having to maintain hardware and networks, instant sharing and collaboration with team members without needing an infrastructure, and so-forth.
One of the last hurdles (for me) was getting the ease-of-use I wanted, being able to work with what I need to work with, without having everything running as tabs in my browser.
The Google Enterprise blog just announced some new ways to share your docs in Google Apps, which provide for more flexibility.
With more and more client companies using Google Docs sharing to collaborate, this more granular control should come in handy.
…or just here, in North Coastal San Diego County?
Back towards the beginning of this year, I was amused by Verizon’s campaign to illustrate that their 3G network is significantly larger than AT&T’s, and even more amused when AT&T responded that they “cover more people,” displaying a map that looked bigger than Verizon’s.
I wonder how many people never figured-out that the AT&T map, which “looked better,” was actually a map of their voice coverage, and not their 3G coverage?
About that same time, I began reading all kinds of scathing reports about how AT&T’s 3G coverage was not just spotty, but really pretty slow in some areas.
All of that back-and-forth got me wondering… I had started noticing what I perceived to be a slow-down in the 3G service provided by T-Mobile on my wife’s Android phone, and decided to see how well it was really performing, by conducting a series of speed tests over time.
