Paper Reading #24: Mobia Modeler: easing the creation process of mobile applications for non-technical users

Title: Mobia Modeler: easing the creation process of mobile applications for non-technical users

Authors: Florence Balagtas-Fernandez, Max Tafelmayer, and Heinrich Hussmann.

Venue: IUI '10 Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces

Comments

http://isthishci.blogspot.com/2011/04/paper-reading-24-natural-language.html
http://vincehci.blogspot.com/2011/04/paper-reading-24-finding-your-way.html

Summary
This paper details a development tool termed Mobia Modeler designed to enable users without programing experience to create their own mobile applications. The tool features configurable components that are common in mobile applications. To illustrate the concept, this paper focused on health monitoring applications for mobile devices. The authors go on to describe a sample application called Health Monitor created using Mobia Modeler, and the steps taken to create the application. A labeled screenshot of the interface in use is shown below:

Discussion
I thought this was one of the most applicable projects of all the papers I have read in the intelligent user interfaces venue. While the quality of apps created by this program will almost certainly be lower than applications created by someone with programming knowledge, this type of innovation has great potential to take off. Blogs like this one are a similar concept, where most individuals don't have the time or experience to make quality websites, blogs provide a compromise between quality and features, and ease of use.