Despite the belief of some skeptics that Google's new, free development software, App Inventor, will flood the Android market with useless apps, it's not necessarily true that this product will lower the bar for application development. Admittedly, some of the home-grown applications people create may be frivolous or ineffective, but take a closer look at some of the iPhone apps, such as Tickle Me, which laughs when you fondle the screen, or iBeer, which shows fat lips chugging a beer. Wow, these are useful, quality products. The point is, there is some truth to that old cliché, "Necessity is the mother of invention." Some of the greatest inventions came from average, everyday people with no formal education in the fields they exploited. In other words, you don't have to be a programmer to write programs, which is the thought behind Google App Inventor. That's especially true now that many programming languages have easy, menu-driven user interfaces that are essentially, fill-in-the-blank forms; that is, the "programmer" just clicks options on the screen, and the software generates the code. And that's what Google's App Inventor is built to do. Once you download the application, set up your computer and phone for App Inventor, then skim through the tutorials, you should see another menu driven, point-and-click--or drag-and-drop--program that generates the code for you........................ http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/201009/google_app_inventor_ope...