Google sends reminder of demise of Google App Inventor, limited time to download your projects

As you may or may not be aware, a few months ago Google announced they were shutting down Google Labs, numbered among the many cool labs they had in place was Google App Inventor. Google App Inventor is a simple tool for non-programmers which allowed you to assemble code with the App Inventor Blocks Editor, where you select the components for your app then assemble the program blocks that specify how the components should behave. You assemble programs visually, fitting pieces together like pieces of a puzzle. Now registered users of the lab are being sent this email :

Dear App Inventor User,

As we announced on the App Inventor Announcement Forum, Google will end support for App Inventor on December 31, 2011, after which data in appinventorbeta.com will not be accessible and will be deleted from Google servers. You can preserve your App Inventor projects by simply clicking on the Download All Projects button on your My Projects page. This will download to your computer a zipped archive of all your projects. We recommend you retrieve your projects well before December 31st.

By the end of 2011 Google will also be making the complete App Inventor source code publicly available under an open source license, so that anyone can study the code and modify it as they desire.

In order to ensure the future success of App Inventor, Google has funded the establishment of a Center for Mobile Learning at the MIT Media Lab. Sometime in the first quarter of 2012, the Center plans to provide an App Inventor service for general public access, similar to the one Google is currently running.

In order for you to continue working with your projects in an open source instance (MIT or otherwise) of App Inventor you will need to download your data from appinventorbeta.com before December 31st and later upload them to an open source instance as it becomes available.

Please visit the App Inventor user forums to get future updates on App Inventor. You can also visit http://mobilelearning.mit.edu/ for updates on what is being done with App Inventor at MIT.

The App Inventor Team

So i’ve downloaded all my projects, even though they didn`t really turn out exactly how I wanted them and I eagerly await MIT`s input into App Inventor and can`t wait to see how far they can take it. Hopefully it will be Awesome.

MIT Video on App Inventor :