The team is trying to raise $50,000 on Kickstarter. “Right now it’s a prototype, and we want to build a minimum viable product, so this is this is basically marketing research, and it will provide some capital to fund the project.” “We wanted to see how many people are actually excited about this idea,” Ye told me. Besides the basic necessities of an app, some of the higher-level ones include the ability to take a picture with the phone’s camera and use the image, the ability to connect to other devices via NFC, and the ability to take over a phone’s Bluetooth connection.īut it’s still early days in the project - hence the Kickstarter campaign. The framework is extensible, and the team is building new blocks continuously. Jimu does this by via what Ye calls “blocks:” chunks of code that insert objects like pictures, text, buttons, and actions. At a minimum, then, it’s a rapid prototyping tool that actually works, rather than being a clickable model, a wireframe, or a set of screenshots. So Jimu not only enables drag-and-drop creation of app functionality, it also creates clean, commented source code for all your apps … which those with a technical bent can then take and customize or extend even more. All their apps look pretty much the same, and you can’t customize very much.” “There’s a lot of frameworks to let non-developers create apps, but it’s just a form to fill in. “We want to give everyone a jumpstart to create apps, but still leave room for developers to customize however they want,” Ye says. Pick a style, select some features, choose a content feed, subscribe to Twitter updates, import a photo stream. The challenge lies in the fact that while there are many great tools and frameworks to help non-developers build apps - Andromo, AppyPie, AppsGeyser, and TheAppBuilder come to mind - they tend to be a little cookie cutter. The rest of it is all about those software developers who are already building Android apps today and dealing with the surprisingly repetitive and challenging tasks for each and every app they build.
That’s part of the goal, but not all of it. “Everyone should be able to play with the software that surrounds us.”īut Ye doesn’t want to just build a framework for the n00bs: those of us who can’t program in Java and build our own apps. “We want to make it possible for a lot more people to create apps,” Jimu founder Linkton Ye told me yesterday via Skype.
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