Today’s Personal Computing is Increasingly About Us

In the preface to a book on AppInventor, Hal Abelson, Director of MIT ‘s Center for Mobile Learning writes:

Today’s mobile applications are making computing “personal” as never before. Today, we carry computers with us constantly, as smartphones and pads and the new devices that are regularly emerging.  More significantly, today’s personal computing is increasingly “about” us: where we live, where we work, who our friends are, what we buy, what we like, whom we talk with, and what we talk about. This personal computing is linked to global data services and information sources in a way that fundamentally transforms our experience and our perception of our world, just as television did for people beginning in the 1950s.

He goes on to describe the goals of App Inventor, a tool for creating mobile applications:

When we created App Inventor at Google, we were motivated by the vision that mobile computing could be personal computing technology that you can actually personalize, by creating applications for yourself and your friends, without having to be an expert programmer

Whether this will happen or not, only time will tell. It will be an interesting decade for non programmers to personalize their little mobile computers (phones and pads).