手机应用初创公司通过上周大规模的发布会、产品演示活动，向世人宣告自己的存在。从这些公司中，我们发现许多DIY手机应用开发工具重出江湖，这意味着，如今网页设计公司只要稍不留神就有可能被夺权。

这些更为大众化、强大的工具涌入市场，带来了一个问题——我们会重新回到充斥闪烁标签文本和侧边滚动旗帜广告的网络时代吗？

mobile-apps

在20世纪90年代末，网络成为新的希望圣地，网页制作（Microsoft Frontpage）等程序将乐观的冒险家引向了信息高速公路。据游戏邦了解，用户无需应对神秘的HTML就可以轻松创建自己的网页，整个过程就和在word文字处理器中设计文档一样简单。创建网页不用花钱，而且用户可以自主选择，这实在太可怕了。

在这个时代，作为一名独立的网页创建者和设计者，我需要应对各种各样的要求。我拒绝了兽医要求用户访问他们网站时能够听到动物声音的请求，我也常常忽略客户的一些其他要求，例如添加背景音乐、神秘而具有诱惑性的导航，以及无关紧要的天气小工具。我通常不会在网页中加入如此糟糕的设计，只是希望用户访问的网站不会出现动态的“正在建设中”这类图像文件，我觉得这是我的职责所在。

继字体繁多、色彩缤纷的网站时代之后，我们进入了一个网站标准化时代。游戏邦发现在这个阶段，企业已不再自己创建网页了，而是转而依靠Google、Facebook、Yelp以及其他一些在线服务网站。餐厅经理和兽医不需要再身兼创意总监的职务，他们只需填充相关信息，就可以拥有一个使用方便、画面协调的网页。

如果DIY、拖放式手机网页应用开发工具是未来的发展趋势，那我们真是兜了一大圈。网页又会重新出现脱离主题的功能和糟糕的设计。这些应用也许可以处理复杂的编码过程，但它们并不会把设计和用户体验这两项最重要的技能传授给终端用户。

我有此番顿悟得益于某些公司登台表演，他们展示了用户如何利用网页浏览器快速、便捷地创建自己的应用。瞧，他们说你可以添加地图。如果你是餐厅老板——你可以添加自己的菜单。既然添加了菜单，为何不把小费计算器也加进去呢？

从餐厅的小费计算器到小孩的字谜游戏、整个家庭的小游戏，这不过是思维的短暂跳跃。

各位的想法是什么呢？下一代的用户自创手机网页应用会不会是Geocities的再现？驯服的野兽和我们的民俗文物只能出现在互联网的黑暗角落和时光机器的历史文档中吗？（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，转载请注明来源：游戏邦）

Are We Entering the Dark Ages of Mobile Apps?

Between LAUNCH and DEMO, this last week has seen more than its fair share of startups. Among these companies, we’ve seen a number of DIY mobile app creation tools throw their hat into the ring and promise a world where getting your company into someone’s hands is as simple as dragging and dropping a couple of buttons.

With all of these democratizing, empowering tools hitting the market, there’s just one question – are we about to relive the era of <blink> tag text and marquee side-scrolling banner ads?

In the late 1990s, the Web was the new promise land, and programs like Microsoft Frontpage brought optimistic adventurers to the Information Super Highway. Rather than dealing with cryptic HTML, users could create websites as easily as they could format documents in a word processor. It was freeing, it was democratizing and it was absolutely terrible.

During this self-same era, I worked as a freelance web developer and designer and was therefor subject to all manner of requests. I turned down bids for veterinarians who wanted their website to bark and chirp at visitors and I regularly ignored requests for background music, mystery meat navigation and irrelevant weather widgets. I simply refused to plague the Web with such terrible design and, I feel, singlehandedly saved several hundred folks, at the very least, from visiting yet another site with an animated “Under Construction” GIF. That, I felt, was part of my job.

Since that era of multi-font, multi-color websites, however, we’ve seen a movement to standardization. Businesses, instead of creating their own online presence, have come to rely on sites like Google, Facebook, Yelp and any number of other online services. The restaurant manager and the veterinarian are no longer moonlighting as creative directors, they simply fill in the blanks and it all gets plugged into a user-friendly, uniform online presence.

If DIY, drag-and-drop mobile Web app creators are the future, however, then we may come full circle. We may return to the land of irrelevant features and terrible design just yet. These apps may handle the complex coding aspect of creating a mobile presence, but they don’t teach the end-user the most important skills – design and user experience.

It all dawned on me when one of these companies got up on stage and showed off how quickly and easily anyone with a Web browser could create their own app. Look, they said. You can add a map. You’re a restaurant – you can add your menu. And while your at it, why not add a tip calculator?

It is but a short mental leap from tip calculator to word find puzzles for the kids and trivia games for the whole family.

What do you think? Will the next generation of user-created mobile Web apps be the resurgence of the Geocities generation? Or is that beast well-contained and a relic of our folkloric past, only to be found in the dark corners of the Internet and in the archives of the Wayback Machine?（Source：ReadWriteWeb）