Android App Inventor Open Sourced, Code Released

Man, if I had the spare cycles to do it, I would love to build this as a browser based service that just calls a (cloud) back end compiler and produces output files. Ajax UI design plus templates would seem like an ideal basis to build trivial apps, and maybe a Chrome plugin or native code conduit to let you talk to the connected USB device and walk you through configuration thereof.

Configuring Android development on the desktop is not terribly complicated, but it's a high bar for new adoption as compared to "install and launch Dreamweaver".

I guess that's sort of the market for Titanium Appcelerator, but that's still a beast by comparison to "this should all be doable in a browser environment". But I don't delude myself that this would be a small project :)

You will need to have Java, Ant and the App Engine SDK installed on your machine. :\