Innovation continues to happen at a crisp pace since Google launched its App Engine in April. Yesterday, a programmer for the company, which has been dinged for accepting applications only coded in Python, introduced Google App Engine Launcher for Mac OS X.
The app, unleashed during MacWorld, aims to manage a list of those unwieldy App Engine apps. With a few clicks, developers can run, browse, deploy and view logs for their apps, John Skidgel, senior interaction designer for Google, wrote in a post Thursday.
Thinking how unfriendly command-line interfaces can be and how much repetitive typing he had been doing to test and deploy applications, Skidgel and Co. used these ingredients to create the App Engine Launcher for Mac OS X as one of those famed 20 percent projects.
“While I was writing scenario applications to test Google App Engine, I had the following idea: If Mac HTML editor BBEdit, Adobe’s Dreamweaver, Mac style sheet editor CSSEdit, and Mac text editor TextMate were at a party, what kind of application would be welcomed to help with App Engine development?” Skidgel wrote.
A party scenario for code? Now, these are hardly the type of scenarios that normal people envision, but Google engineers are more like superheroes than they are Clark Kents.
This is great, but Google will have to enable some additional languages other than Python soon, or there will be a mutiny among programmers, particularly the ones who complain about being sharecroppers locked into the Google plantation to harvest more green for the company.
And I don’t mean cabbage.