[Gllug] App development for children

[Christopher Hunter]

On Wed, 2011-05-18 at 06:23 +0100, JLMS wrote:
> On 17 May 2011 09:48, John Hearns <hearnsj at googlemail.com> wrote:
> > Yesterday's Evening Standard carried an article on Nick Cleggs speech
> > at the Google conference.
> > All schoolchildren are to be trained in how to develop 'apps' for
> > iPhone and Blackberry.
> >
> > Does this fill you with depression also?
> 
> No.
> 
> > Teaching the next generation
> > to parrot the developments of this generation,
> > because its successful, innit?
> 
> So should they be taught non marketable skills? Or should we contact a
> medium to foresee the technologies that will be useful in the future? I
> for once declare my crystal ball needs an upgrade of OS.

They are already being force-fed MS Office, which even the
stuck-in-the-mud government department I work for is trying to abandon
in favour of an OS alternative.  

All the "IT skills" taught in schools are worthless with the possible
exception of typing!  It's not a question of crystal-ball gazing, it's
simple common sense (sadly lacking in both education and government).  

The iPhone is increasingly a software "blind alley", and is being
abandoned by programmers in favour of the Android offering because
there's a much wider market for it...  The Blackberry is even more
obscure, and will go the way of the Apple effort soon enough.  

The two preponderant phone / tablet operating systems will be Android
and Windows.  Android will probably win out in the end because despite
all the massive amounts of money that MS can throw at the problem, they
have NEVER managed to get a mobile operating system anywhere near right!

It's interesting to see the reaction of people when they discover that
the underlying OS beneath Android is Linux.  Google have been very
clever with their marketing and the large numbers of Android devices
being shipped right now demonstrate that Linux (albeit a small sub-set
of Linux) has found a widely accepted niche!

C.

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