Google has reminded its users that the flagship platform to allow anyone to create an Android app will permanently shut down at the end of the year.

App Inventor was an ambitious project that replaced complex app coding with an intuitive graphical user interface. It was fantastic in allowing anyone to create an app.

However, App Inventor never left beta form and many extensions of the project just never happened. For example, users were not able to publish their creations to the Android Market and there were severe limitations on how complex the app could be.
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A recent survey jointly conducted by Appcelerator and IDC indicates that (Titanium) developers favor Android over iOS for next-gen TVs and other embedded devices.

Indeed, 72% of devs believe Google’s versatile OS “is best positioned to power a large number of connected devices in the future,” compared to just 25% for iOS.

As a result, 59% of developers now favor Android’s long-term outlook, versus 35% for iOS.

Nevertheless, Apple iOS continues to dominate in all categories relating to current market/revenue opportunity and devices.
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Windows Phone 7 (WP7) is coming later this year and today Microsoft released a beta version of developer tools to enable software makers to build applications and games for WP7 devices.

Microsoft, which has conceded problems with its mobile initiative and has faced plenty of criticism, also said it is releasing pre-production preview Windows Phone 7 devices broadly to developers on Monday. Last week, it gave the first preview devices to two high school students in Poland known as Beastware who submitted a game for WP7 called Droid Assault. The game won the Windows Phone Rockstar contest.
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Google’s launched a new software tool that it says allows anybody to become an Android developer.

The company says that App Inventor - which goes into beta today - allows the creation of apps from simple games to class quizzes: ‘just about any app you can imagine,’ says the company.

App Inventor gives access to a GPS location sensor, for example, allowing a dozy user to create an app to help find their car in a busy parking lot. The company also suggests an app that will automatically respond to texts received while driving with an automated message.
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Budding iPhone developers who think it’s too cumbersome to buy a Mac and learn a new variant of the C++ language to program for the iPhone, can finally create apps from the comfort of their Windows PC.

Zimusoft has released its own iPhone SDK (software development kit) that emulates and debugs an iPhone program from Windows.

Apple’s official SDK only runs on Mac computers and forces users to program with Objective-C, a C++ variant that only a minority of programmers have experience with.
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Microsoft Corp. has done more to popularize graphical programming than any other vendor. The company’s development tools, led by Visual Basic and Visual Studio, have been used by millions of software developers over the past two decades.

But during a revealing and often humorous panel discussion on the future of programming at last week’s Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, Microsoft’s own superstar developers espoused their loyalty to old-school methods of coding software.
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Motorola has just released its latest Motodev kit that enables developers to obtain early access to tools and programs, allowing such folks to gain an early lead when it comes to developing and programming new applications for Motorola’s future Google Android devices. Inside Motodev one will find the App Accelerator Program and Motodev Studio for Android Beta.
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