An App To Find South Indian Eating Places In The San Francisco South Bay Area

First, I believe that mobile applications are going to trigger a long tail of enterprise software applications. We will soon have mobile applications that are meant for a few people for just a few days.

Second, I believe that 'making to think' i.e., prototyping is the most effective way to design and build products. It is also the best way to convey design intent to the development teams and the best way to verify the value a product brings for customers.

I tried out Google App Inventor for a few months and strongly believe that it will help product managers and products designers understand the possibilities and opportunities thrown open by a mobile device. I also believe that it will help them convey their ideas more effectively to product development colleagues.

I am trying to convince my product management colleagues to give Google App Inventor, a simple Android mobile application creation tool, a try. So I created a simple mobile application that lists a few South Indian restaurants and connects to Google maps to give you directions to the restaurant you pick, from your current location.

Clearly, the app makes sense only for a few thousand people in the world. That is fine because the cost and effort required to build apps makes it possible to build for just a few thousand or even a few hundred people.

In the video below, I show the application and also give a brief explanation of how I built it using Google App Inventor. I hope this post will make you curious about the possibilities of prototyping and the future of enterprise mobile applications.

All the logic you need to build the "Let's Go South Indian Today" app.