I’ve decided that this website — my digital manifestation forcing its way into your eyeballs — should better reflect my style.

No gradients.

No matching color schemes.

No lists of images that go “SWwoosSHH” when you click right and left arrows.

Text.  Black.  White.  Done.

Welcome to the new Lunduke.com.

This week, Google has released the first version of Android App Inventor, a tool for visually developing applications for Android powered devices.

Being as I develop another visual software development tool (Illumination Software Creator), I’ve received a rather hefty pile of emails from people asking me my thoughts on it.

Let me be frank: I couldn’t be happier about it. I am, in a word, thrilled.

Any tool that helps to make computing fun and accessible to more people is A-OK in my book!

Along those lines: I don’t view App Inventor as a direct competitor to Illumination Software Creator in any way.

Google’s Android App Inventor is really a pretty standard development environment.  It includes a nice, straight forward visual designer to lay out the look and feel of your application.  And, likewise, it includes a pretty straight forward, run of the mill, programming language.

The key differentiator, from “standard” programming tools, being that you don’t actually type your code, you drag and drop pieces of your code and lock them together.  (The “code editor” is based on the, very cool, Scratch — which is focused on making it easier to teach children programming and logic.)

Illumination Software Creator takes an entirely different approach — self contained “blocks’ that can be linked together without any restrictions.

In this regard using Illumination to create an application is much like playing with lego building blocks.

Whereas using Android App Inventor to create an application is much like… well… programming an application… with a mouse instead of a keyboard.

The approach of the two is almost night and day different… and both are worth while in my opinion.

Android App Inventor even has the, extremely cool, feature of being able to live debug your applications on your phone as you build them.  I declare that “Super Neat-O”.

Overall, I am overjoyed.  An attempt at bringing Android smartphone development to anyone who has an urge to tinker.  I love it.

Another big plus, in my book, is that App Inventor is supported on Linux, Windows and MacOS X (just like Illumination Software Creator).  Cross platform support is a big deal in my mind.  Providing people and organizations with the freedom to choose their own platform is critical.

Which brings my to the big downside to App Inventor — It is focused on one single target platform (Android).  That really is my only big complaint, and is a key piece what will, in the long run, dramatically limit App Inventor’s usefulness.

That’s really the key big difference between App Inventor (Android only) and Illumination Software Creator (Mac, Windows, Linux, Nokia Tablets, Adobe Flash/Flex Websites and, soon, Haiku-OS).

(That screenshot on the right is Illumination Software Creator… not App Inventor.  That’ll give you an idea of the workflow and design differences of the two visual programming tools.)

I certainly understand Google’s interest in furthering and focusing on Android, I just find that limitation… limiting.  This is the same basic limitation that, say, using X-Code to write iPhone applications creates.

What happens when you want to run your software on another platform?  Can’t.  Stuck.  Time to re-write from scratch (or mostly from scratch).  I am lazy.  I don’t want to have to re-write something I’ve already written.

But, that aside, App Inventor looks great.   I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to dabble in Android development.

That is, of course, until Illumination Software Creator releases official support for building Android apps.  Then using App Inventor will be just plain silly.

With the beta testing for the 2.1 update of Illumination Software Creator just around the corner (stay tuned to this blog, or the Illumination Forum for info when available), I wanted to let you in on something cool.

Sure.  Version 2.1 will bring some cool graphical capabilities (drawing and whatnot) to the awesome-est, cross platform-y-est, visual software creator out there.  (Name one other tool that lets you build Python desktop and mobile application, and Flash web applications, without writing a single line of code.)

Sure.  Version 2.1 will be a free update to all existing users.  Because we love you guys.

But there’s one feature  in 2.1 that… well… we kept a secret.  And we think it’s pretty gosh darned awesome.

For the full details… you’re just going to have to wait till the beta version is available.  For now, here’s a little teaser:

Sure.  Illumination is cool.  It lets you build cross platform applications (utilizing Python and GTK) that run on just about every computer and device on the planet.

And you can do so from the comfort of your Linux or Windows desktop… in a completely visual way.  (Heck, most of the people using it have never programed software in their life!)

But let’s kick it up a notch, shall we?

As of today, Illumination Software Creator 2.0 is available.  And it is awesome.

For two big reasons:

1. Adobe Flash / Flex

That’s right.  From that same project file that you’ve already been working on, you can now build an Adobe Flash powered rich website.  With a single click.

Built a cool puzzle game and want to share it with the world?  Just click the build menu item and presto — you’ve got a Flash based puzzle game… complete with a snippet of HTML to drop into your blog.  Easy as pie.

2. MacOS X

For those of you using MacOS X… we didn’t want you to feel left out of the party.

So now Illumination runs great on MacOS X as well as Linux and Windows.

Think that through for a second.

A tool for creating software.  That doesn’t require that you write any code.  Is 100% visual and can be picked up and used by anyone…

That runs on Linux.  On Windows.  On MacOS X.

And builds software for Flash powered websites, every type of desktop operating system we can think of and nokia internet tablets.

That.  Is.  Cool.

To go along with all that goodness, we’ve revamped RadicalBreeze.com to have a nice new look and easier navigation.

And, of course, this brand new version is a free upgrade to each and every Illumination user.

Haven’t purchased Illumination yet?  Now’s a good time!

And, if you want to chat with other Illumination developers, the official forum is the place to be.