Whoa. Definitely wasn't ready for HN-style exposure.
As bmoskowitz pointed out we have some rough words about the project. For this group, I'd in particular point out the roadmap and CONTRIBUTORS.md documents on the github repo:
At the highest level, we're exploring whether it's possible to make a tool that lets non-devs (_not_ you folks!) who currently see their phones as a pure engine of consumption, as a place where they can create something fun or useful.
It's very, very early software, and it's public mostly because a) we kinda don't know how to do anything else, and b) we're going to use early and frequent user feedback to correct the aim on the product.
If people are interested, we're more than happy to entertain questions either here or on github, irc, the mailing list, etc.
Oh, and yeah, many of the components are broken, brittle, etc. This is still just a prototype.
That said, we're getting positive reactions from people close to our target audience, such as high school teachers, people teaching others how to make their first app, etc.
I'm sure we have loads of x-browser compatibility bugs, as well as known issues with respect to accessibility, absent localization, no great mechanism for contributing new components, and many more.
Oh, and the gamification bits in particular were really just testing the gamification APIs -- the levels we have in place are deeply unuseful =).
"That said, we're getting positive reactions from people close to our target audience, such as high school teachers, people teaching others how to make their first app, etc."
I bet. But this is part of the problem with many of Mozilla's products targeting the education space (Open Badges, I'm looking at you). Teachers, administrators, bureaucrats think they're the cat's meow. But (of course) they want nothing to do with the implementation details. But they do expect them to be usable.
"At the highest level, we're exploring whether it's possible to make a tool that lets non-devs (_not_ you folks!) who currently see their phones as a pure engine of consumption, as a place where they can create something fun or useful."
That's a fantastic idea. So are open badges. But "us folks" are the ones that (whether we work in edu IT, at an edtech company, or are fellow travellers) are expected to make these half-baked great ideas work, reliably, in the real world, for educators and students.
I'm not trying to rant. Mozilla has great ideas for education.
But the poor (maybe I should be more generous and say incomplete) implementation of so many of these great ideas (Persona, Open Badges, and now Appmaker) is maddening when they're presented in a way that "not us folks" expect them to be available for production implementation.
Yeah, we need to do a better job of distinguishing "really early" from "ready for use". Expect a change in the landing page within a few hours (the team is currently scattered over three countries).
I'm your target market. Apart from my tech company, where I'm definitely not the technical founder, I also own a consulting company and construction firm. I've been patching together solutions with excel, trello, google calendar, etc, and this is exactly what i need.
Get it working, I always need tools customized to a particular task that a simple app would solve.
As bmoskowitz pointed out we have some rough words about the project. For this group, I'd in particular point out the roadmap and CONTRIBUTORS.md documents on the github repo:
I wrote some earlier words at https://github.com/mozilla/appmaker-words/wiki, but that's quite possibly out of date.At the highest level, we're exploring whether it's possible to make a tool that lets non-devs (_not_ you folks!) who currently see their phones as a pure engine of consumption, as a place where they can create something fun or useful.
It's very, very early software, and it's public mostly because a) we kinda don't know how to do anything else, and b) we're going to use early and frequent user feedback to correct the aim on the product.
If people are interested, we're more than happy to entertain questions either here or on github, irc, the mailing list, etc.
Oh, and yeah, many of the components are broken, brittle, etc. This is still just a prototype.
That said, we're getting positive reactions from people close to our target audience, such as high school teachers, people teaching others how to make their first app, etc.
I'm sure we have loads of x-browser compatibility bugs, as well as known issues with respect to accessibility, absent localization, no great mechanism for contributing new components, and many more.
Oh, and the gamification bits in particular were really just testing the gamification APIs -- the levels we have in place are deeply unuseful =).