Just watched a great episode of MacBreak on developing iPad “web apps” using automation on Mac OS X.

The idea is to prepare some media for sharing, and the automation can do the rest. It is definitely worth a try. I only wish they would have shown us more of the Mac manipulation than the hosts.

For more, check out padilicious.com/.

Today, Google announced App Inventor, a mobile application creator for the Android platform.

This past school year, I attended a CocoaTouch class on building apps for iPhone – and dropped out early, in part, because it was way over my head. But having taught educators how to use Scratch and Alice both, this new development platform from Google which uses the block metaphor from MIT’s Lifelong Kindergarten group looks interesting. Real interesting.

You might ask what this means for kids–is it simply a tutorial for programming? I’m not sure the programming aspect is the real key here, but instead, it’s the fact that kids can create programs they can really use. There’s a difference here: Alice and Scratch for the most part run in their respective environments. Scratch, especially (strong in my opinion of the two development environments) is geared towards sharing your creations online with other peers. But what’s next when you’re ready to graduate from Scratch?

Alice is an obvious choice – but while Alice has a richer programming heritage behind it, the social aspect is missing which makes Scratch infectious for young learners. But imagine when a class all has an Android phone (or device) in their pocket… and they can run those apps!

Our own Virginia DOE has put their weight behind Apple and app development for iOS with two recent contests. With this Google tool, and a few months of maturity behind the platform, I think educators will finally have a chance to really give such a challenge a go. I don’t personally own an Android phone, so I take this all with a biased look… my iPhone preference aside, I think this is big news.

If kids can create real apps that they can run on their own (real) phones, it’s gonna be huge. Even if they are simple apps like the one demonstrated in the video – I can’t wait to see where this is going. I’ve already signed up to be a beta tester and await to try it out myself. For a non-programmer (or one that hasn’t programmed since the 1980s) CocoaTouch was a nightmare. Block-based programming takes the syntax element away and lets app development flourish.

Over the past two weeks, I’ve heard that now iconic word more times than I ever thought possible in passive conversation among teachers I had the opportunity to work with: Facebook. “Played it on… FB.” “Did you see her new pictures on FB? So cute!” “During lunch, I gotta get on FB!”

Of course, just a few weeks earlier, FB was in the news (if not casual conversations) due to issues relating to privacy settings. The company made news for making privacy complicated to control. What I personally found more troubling is that the company could not always honor its own privacy principles. Friends would tell me “My data is secure, I made all the right settings and de-friended the right people.” Meanwhile, the company reveals that private information was compromised for a short period of time.

Educator Liza Wiemer has recently published a post about the assumption that there is no real concept of “privacy” on a social network. She names our favorite FB (surprise!). This doesn’t surprise me, and I tend to agree with her thinking.

But while I’d be the last one to start defending the social network, I will say that the advice she gives is sound for almost any forum or space you may choose to communicate with online. Reading the hints seem like banal common sense. But for folks who have spent little time thinking about what publishing content to the online communities that now exist means, let alone “publishing” anything, they seem easily tripped up.

Where will we be with tools like these 5 or 10 years from now? I think it will be very interesting. For the conveniences of convening with our friends, we sacrifice time we had before not devoted to concerns about our own privacy. Mr. Zuckerberg (Facebook CEO) has said that the norms of privacy are changing. We’re becoming a more open society when we play online.

That’s not a bad thing, per se. But the balance of authenticity does not always play in our favor. And faking who you are can take its toll, too.

Our lives, as recorded in digital bits, will be more difficult to forget, from our best days to our worst. Those who care are those who either love us or despise us.

I find this stuff fascinating; especially after recently doing a workshop on the affects of using digital imagery in instruction.

Sometimes people do things that really catch your attention. They may do exceptionally well at something, and our response, impressed by such a feat, is to tell them that we’re impressed.

That rocked!

Author Seth Godin, however, says something about this.

You don’t rock all the time. No one does. No one is a rock star, superstar, world-changing artist all the time. In fact, it’s a self-defeating goal. You can’t do it.

His point? Try “rocking” at something for just 5 minutes. A day. Don’t aim to be doing profound things all the time, but instead, baby-step those things you can do an extraordinary job at.

I think the advice also fits in line with something else Godin said earlier this month:

Very few people wake up in the morning and feel like taking big risks or feel like digging deep for something that has eluded them. People don’t usually feel like pushing themselves harder than they’ve pushed before or having conversations that might be uncomfortable.

You might not feel like climbing the big mountains all the time. What’s important is mounting small hills, each one in stride, not conquering everything, just little things that you can do that make a difference.