Category Archives: Programming Method

Components, Programming Method

A Tip Calculator App (version 1) written in App Inventor

5 Comments

What the App Does

This is a simple app to calculate the tip and total bill at a restaurant – or other service provider where a tip is common place.

This is the first of 3 apps that will implement a tip calculator.

  • Version 1 (this tutorial) introduces the basic app and demonstrates the use of error checking to handle user data entry mistakes.
  • Version 2 will introduce an App Inventor feature that makes the app more interactive and reduces data entry errors.
  • Version 3 will introduce a way to avoid user data entry errors – by designing the app in such a way that the user can enter only correct values.

Check back in the days ahead to see how this app evolves to Version 2 and then Version 3. I think you will learn a lot, have a bit of fun, and end up with an app that might be rather useful!

The Tip Calculator User Interface

In version 1.0, The user interface features two inputs: one for the amount of the bill and one for the tip, as a percentage (such as 20 for 20%), plus a button to calculate the amount of the tip and the total bill including the tip.

TipCalculatorUI

A Notifier component displays a warning message when non-numeric values are entered for the amount of the bill and the tip. See “Display Warning and Alert Boxes in App Inventor apps” for a tutorial on the use of message boxes.

The label fields below the button display the result of the calculation.

The arrangement of the user interface controls relies on vertical and horizontal layouts.  Please see “Chapter 4 – Layouts in Detail” – available here – to learn how to use the layout features to arrange components in the user interface. The layouts are arranged as shown in this components list:

TipCalculatorComponents

If layouts are confusing for you, you may just drag and drop controls on to the Viewer any way you wish, but by using the Vertical and Horizontal Arrangement layouts, the controls can be arranged in a more pleasing way and centered on the screen. Your best bet is to learn how to use layouts as they provide a way of creating nice user interfaces that work in both portrait and landscape modes – automatically. Refer to Chapter 4-Layouts in Detail for a tutorial on layouts.

The labels used to display the calculation result are shown in 18 point font size. To set the font size, select the label in the Viewer and then enter a FontSize value of 18 (or other size – your choice) as shown here:

TipCalculatorPropertiesLabel

For the text box data entry, use the Hint property to enter an example data entry, as shown below:

TipCalculatorPropertiesTxtBox

 

The Blocks Code

This tutorial introduces data error checking – specifically, if the user enters non-numeric values for the bill or the tip amount, then a message box is displayed. The blocks code, below, is too large to display full size. However, you can view an enlarged version by clicking on the image. Depending on your Internet browser, you should be able to click a second time to zoom in on the image.

TipCalculatorBlocks

How This Works

An if-then-else block is used – together with the is a number? block – to ensure that only valid numbers are processed by the program. Note that there are two if-then else blocks – the first checks that the entered bill amount is a numeric value, and the second checks that the entered tip value is numeric. If either data entry contains non-numeric characters, a message is displayed on the screen about the problem.

The calculation of the tip is straight forward. The percent value (such as 20 for 20%) is converted to a decimal fraction – 20 becomes .20 – by dividing the percent (20) by 100. The bill amount is then multiplied by the tip percentage. For example, if the bill is 30 and the tip is 20 (%), the tip is 30 x 0.2 or 6. (I am leaving off $ signs to make this tip calculator generic for any currency.)

The total bill, including tip, is just the sum of the calculated tip amount and the original bill.

Key Features Shown

  • Use of is a number?
  • Use of error checking and processing
  • Use of layouts

Downloads

  • Source code App Inventor “.aia” source file (App Inventor source code files have the filename extension .aia)
  • Download the source code to your computer. Then, in App Inventor, go to the Projects menu and select “Import project (.aia) from my computer…”
Components, Programming Method

Sensors: Using the Accelerometer to detect motion

4 Comments

This tutorial introduces the accelerometer – at a high level – as a tool to detect the phone being shaken. You can use this feature as another kind of user input to your app – for example, make a game where shaking the phone resets the game play or starts a new game.

An accelerometer is a hardware device that detects and measures motion, typically in three axes: X, Y and Z. For example, if the phone is moved left or right, the acceleration changes in the X axis and the accelerometer returns a value indicating the X axis movement.

Smart phones – and many modern devices – have special hardware accelerometer components built in. The orientation sensor, described previously, is actually a software sensor that uses the hardware accelerometer but converts acceleration into orientation values.

The purpose of this demonstration app is to show one example of using the accelerometer.

The user interface is simple – it displays a Start button and a Stop button, and the status of the accelerometer.

AccelUI

 

Continue reading Sensors: Using the Accelerometer to detect motion →

Components, Programming Method, Video

Sensors: How to use the Orientation Sensor

3 Comments

Smart phones and tablets contain several kinds of “sensors” to sense information about their environment. For example, an accelerometer provides information about movement of the phone (or tablet) – letting us know the speed and direction of travel in x, y and z coordinates (three dimensions).

The orientation sensor tells us if the phone is tilted to the left or right, or up or down (or flipped over). App Inventor provides a simple to use interface to the orientation sensor. We can use this to control a sprite or ball on the screen – by tilting our phone, we can make graphic items move around on the screen!

Sample source code that you can download is at the bottom of this post!

After going through this tutorial, you now know enough to create your own interactive smart phone game!

Review

Before we get started, please review these earlier tutorials:

Continue reading Sensors: How to use the Orientation Sensor →

Components, Programming Method

Controlling the sprite animation with your finger on the screen

In the prior tutorial, we created a sprite-based bouncing animation – which is surprisingly easy to do in App Inventor.

But how might we make the animation interactive? Such as touching the bouncing object with a finger and flinging it (throwing it) off in another direction? In other words, as the object travels around the screen, we would like to touch it with our finger and then “drag” the object off in a new direction.

To implement this, just handle the Image Sprite’s “Flung” event, like this:

ImageSprite-Flung

 

App Inventor (and the Android OS) handle the details of sensing our finger on the screen and translating that into some values we can use in our app.

When the “Flung” event occurs, App Inventor passes along several values – including the (x,y) coordinate values at the time we touch the object, the speed and heading in which we’ve dragged the object with our finger, and the x and y velocity.  When this event is detected, our program sets the sprite’s current heading and speed to the values determined by our finger drag across the screen.

Click on the “speed” and “heading” parameters in the Flung event to find the “get heading” and “get speed” values.

I multiplied the speed parameter by 3 as the values returned by Flung were small and resulted in slow movement of the sprite. You can set this value to a smaller or larger value based on your preference.

Here’s the app screen, when in use:

Screenshot_2014-10-20-15-53-14

 

As the sprite moves across the screen, touch it with your finger and “fling” it off in a new direction. (You may have to experiment for a bit in terms of how you do your “flings”).

Stopping the Sprite When Touched

If the sprite is moving quickly, it moves out from under your finger before you can take action. To fix this, we sense the finger touching the sprite and stop the sprite while it is being touched.

We implement the “TouchDown” event for ImageSprite1. The moment our finger touches the sprite, the sprite is stopped by setting its Speed property to zero. Now we can casually “fling” the sprite in a new direction.  When we stop touching the sprite, the “TouchUp” event occurs – here we restore the original speed so that the sprite resumes moving. Of course, the “Flung” event occurs next and sets a new speed for the sprite based on our finger movement.

Update: Delete – do not use – the .Touchup block, shown below. It is not needed. Instead, when you lift your finger up as part of a “flung” operation, the flung event handler will set the sprite’s speed proportional to your finger movement. Thus, it is not necessary to restore the saved speed value.

ImageSprite-Touch

Components, Programming Method

Using ImageSprites for animated App Inventor graphics

I described the basics of creating a bouncing ball animation earlier and mentioned that “image sprites” are similar to the bouncing ball graphic, but provide a way to specify your own image for the ball. To introduce a bit about images in App Inventor, we took a quick look at using the phone’s camera.

This tutorial starts with the original bouncing ball program and then modifies it to use an Image Sprite instead of a ball. Be sure to read the bouncing ball and camera tutorials first!

Previous:

The ImageSprite component is almost identical to the ball component!

Continue reading Using ImageSprites for animated App Inventor graphics →

Components, Programming Method

How to create a bouncing ball animation in App Inventor 2

4 Comments

App Inventor 2 provides easy to use features for creating games. These features have proven popular for introducing programming concepts to students in K-12, especially at the elementary and middle school level. While our focus is oriented towards practical applications rather than games, we can have a little fun too!

The purpose of the sample app in this blog post is to illustrate the basic programming concepts of a bouncing ball animation.

The “Game”

Well, its not much of a game! To keep the programming simple, all this does is enable a ball to bounce around on the screen, to change its heading or trajectory, and to make it travel faster or slower. When the ball hits the edge of the screen, it rebounds in an appropriate direction. Here’s the user interface as seen on the smart phone:

Screenshot_2014-10-13-11-40-46

Press the Start button to make the ball start moving; press Stop to end the movement.

To change the speed of movement press the Faster or Slower buttons. Pretty easy?

To change the trajectory, you may enter a heading value in degrees, in the field next to the Set heading button, and then press the Set heading button.

Continue reading How to create a bouncing ball animation in App Inventor 2 →