Inexpensive Android tablet and smart phone available

Chances are, if you are writing App Inventor apps for Android, you already have an Android smart phone or tablet. If not, Amazon has slashed prices on their Amazon Fire Phone, 32GB (Unlocked GSM) and their Amazon Fire HD 7 tablet (but do see NOTE below!):

NOTE – the Fire HD runs Android but its not a fully open Android tablet. However, there are some work aroundsmore info on that here. Here is a CNet web page that shows specifically how to load other apps – there are some limitations so read the whole link. I do not own this tablet and have not tested it with App Inventor. Appears to be the same issue with the Fire Phone – Amazon restricts it but its just a matter of setting some options in Settings to open it up. Would be interesting to hear from others if they have App Inventor apps running on this tablet or phone. Seems like they should work!

Another excellent tablet option is the ASUS Google Nexus 7 Android Tablet (16gb) which is also available in 32 GB:  Nexus 7 from Google (7-Inch, 32 GB, Black) by ASUS (2013) Tablet. I have the ASUS Nexus 7 and really like it a lot.

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What are the hot programming languages for today

Here is an easy to read report on which programming languages are now “hot” in the market for software developers: Don’t Rely On Salary Data To Pick A Programming Language To Learn – ReadWrite.

The pace of change in software development is rapid – popular languages today may already be fading.  Pay scales for some niche languages are very high (such as Ruby)- but the market opportunity might not be large or lengthy.

Web applications and mobile applications are the “hot” categories. Within those categories, there are a variety of currently popular software development tools:

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Facebook followers: Click on “Get Notifications” to stay up to date

Thank you to those that are following these updates via Facebook.

Facebook tries to automatically figure out what posts you read. But if you do not “like”, “click on”, share or comment on pages that you have “Liked”, Facebook removes those pages from your daily “newsfeed”!  And that means pages like the App Inventor 2 Tutorial gradually disappear from your FB newsfeed!

There are two ways to fix this defect in Facebook.

1.  To insure that updates are posted to your newsfeed, click on “Like” on the App Inventor 2 FB page and then click on “Get Notifications” in the drop down menu:

GetNotifications

You can change this setting at any time by visiting the App Inventor 2 page.

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Use Projects | Checkpoint to save a “Snap shot” of your App Inventor project

Tip – Using Projects | Checkpoint

As we develop our app code, we occassionally make changes that do not work. Sometimes our programming breaks a working app! When that occurs, we wish we had saved an copy of the file so that we can return to the original code before we messed it up.

There are several ways to save a copy:

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