All posts by edwardm

General

Still making adjustments to this web site

Yesterday, a WordPress plug in ran “amok” and used up all available system memory, causing this and all of my other web sites to become “unavailable” between about 2130 UTC and 0000 UTC. You would have  seen a “503 Service Unavailable” error when accessing any of the web sites.

I had to remove plug ins one by one from each of my web sites until finding the errant plug in. Then I disabled WordPress until the process was suspended and then restarted WordPress.

At the recommendation of my ISP, I installed a WordPress Cache plug-in which temporarily stores accessed pages as HTML static web pages, which load very fast – versus being generated by the WordPress software and database each time the page is loaded. This, however, coupled with another small change, broke https security giving a “page is not secure” error, and display formatting errors in Firefox. I believe I have that fixed today.

NOTE:  You can access this web site as https://appinventor.pevest.com or https://coldstreams.com/appinventor

If you access via appinventor.pevest.com , I have configured the web server to change the URL over to https://coldstreams.com/appinventor

For some reason, the appinventor.pevest.com/URL form is not working to correctly redirect to the sub URL part of the path.  Since I did not see what is causing this problem, the simplest fix for now was to point to the coldstreams.com/appinventor folder, which is where the web site’s WordPress installation exists.

General

appinventor.pevest.com now running on new server

Update December 26, 2019: The DNS has been updated (or is still in process of being updated) so that appinventor.pevest.com now directs to the new server – yay!

On December 18, 2019, my Internet web hosting provider that runs the appinventor.pevest.com web site announced they are shutting down in February 2020!

Over the past week I have been working to move all of the files, software and databases to a new web host. The good news is that most of the transfer has been completed!

This post you are reading right now is on the new web host, however, the final appearance of this page and some items still need to be updated.

Continue reading appinventor.pevest.com now running on new server →

General

Source code downlinks fixed

Two readers alerted me to problems downloading the source code on the Downloads page on this web site, and the source code for my book on App Inventor graphics and animation.

A software update on the server appears to have changed how some default file directories were appended to filenames.

The problem appears to now be fixed. Thank you very much for letting me know of this problem.

Ed

General

Visit the primary web site at learn2c.org

This web site – appinventor.pevest.com – is no longer the primary web site for our App Inventor tutorials. However, this web site will remain here indefinitely as many people link to it, including search engines and my own e-books 🙂

The new, short and easy to remember URL is Learn2C.org as in “Learn 2 Code”

Unfortunately, for reasons I will not get into, it is not possible to integrate the two web sites together. So appinventor.pevest.com will remain “as is”, and Learn2C.org will become the primary focus point.

I am looking into having Learn2C automatically cross post to the appinventor.pevest.com web site but that has not yet implemented. But I’d like to do that for those that already follow the appinventor.pevest.com web site.

My apologies for not doing a lot of updates during 2018. I have already written some new code examples (Bluetooth LE anyone?) and am working on more in that area. These tutorials will appear once I have completed the entire series of example programs. There are also other items in the works that I cannot talk about yet.


Components

Google will be discontinuing Google Fusion Tables at end of 2019

Google created a cloud-based data base system called Fusion Tables. Later, support for Fusion Tables was added to App Inventor.

If you have used Fusion Tables, you will need to update the code to use a new data base system. You might also consider third-party App Inventor-based development systems such as Appy Builder.

Google has sent out an email advising Fusion Tables users that they will be discontinuing Fusion Tables – literally, the database service will go away on 3 December 2019.

Unfortunately, there is not yet a great alternative database for App Inventor apps other than to switch to Appy Builder.

Hello,

Google Fusion Tables  was launched almost nine years ago as a research project in Google Labs, later evolving into an experimental product. For a long time, it was one of the few free tools for easily visualizing large datasets, especially on a map. Since then, Google has developed several alternatives, providing deeper experiences in more specialized domains.

In order to continue focusing our efforts in these areas, we will be retiring Fusion Tables. We plan to turn down Fusion Tables and the   Fusion Tables API  on December 3, 2019. Embedded Fusion Tables visualizations — maps, charts, tables and cards — will also stop working that day. Maps using the  Fusion Tables Layer  in the Maps JavaScript API v3.37 will start to see errors in August 2019.

Here are some next steps to consider:

Learn about alternative tools

Several new Google tools have been developed over the years, and we encourage you to visit the  Help Center  to learn which ones fit your use-case.

Teams at Google have developed internal tools that can create   powerful map visualizations. We are working to make some of these tools publicly available and will have more to share in the coming months—sign up    to stay in touch.

Download your data    

Filter by  “type:table”  to pull up a list of your tables in Google Drive. Download data from an individual table by following  these instructions. If you have a lot of tables, we will make it easy to download all your data in one step via   Google Takeout   starting in March 2019.

Thank you for supporting Fusion Tables over the years. If you have feedback, visit the Fusion Tables Help Forum.