How about this – a panel full of toggle switches! Tap a switch to flip the switch from On to Off!
I will soon post a tutorial on creating simpler interfaces than the above, but that will be followed by a tutorial to create the above “panel of toggle switches”.
I have ideas for many interesting interface components – I do not yet know if all of them can be built in App Inventor – but we will see!
The server that hosts the appinventor.pevest.com virtual server suffered an outage late on January 17th, continuing into early January 18th. The Internet Service Provider that hosts the server has restored service. From their note to me, it seems there may have been a denial of service attack on their infrastructure.
I was in the midst of writing a new tutorial on creating “pretty user interface” components in App Inventor; that tutorial was lost in the outage. Not as bad as it sounds as the code and illustrations were all saved – I just need to rewrite the text.
Another way to develop apps for Android is to write apps in the Javascript program scripting language (note – Javascript is not related to Java, in spite of the similar name). By using a special platform called Cordova, it is possible to package Javascript programs into a self contained Android .apk file that runs on the Android OS.
Even better – it is possible to package your Javascript app, using Cordova, into forms that run on iOS (iPhones and iPad) and Windows Phone too!
MIT App Inventor is a “graphical programming language” in that we assemble programs by clicking and dragging symbols on screen, interactively, rather than writing our programs as text.
This weekend, FIRST Robotics kicks off its 2016 season. Students will design, construct, test and deploy a complex robotic system to meet the 2016 competition challenge (to be unveiled on Saturday).
The robot control system may be programmed in C++, Java, National Instrument’s LabView, RobotBuilder and/or GRIP.
Continue reading Graphical programming and robotics-the tools get better and easier
The following chart comes from Google Trends, and reflects the growing interest in App Inventor, based on searches for “MIT App Inventor” on Google.
Because App Inventor has been viewed as a training tool in K-12 level schools, and some introductory college courses, searches for App Inventor information have gone down during the northern hemisphere summer months, when school is not normally in session. This accounts for the up and down movement in the trend line.
This chart shows a relative level of interest for the top countries searching for “MIT App Inventor”.
App Inventor Elsa Consulting passes this along on Facebook:
Tip: Right click for download blocks as png Image!
Source: App Inventor Elsa Consulting
In case the link does not work, here’s an example – right click on a blank space in the Blocks editor view and get this pop up menu:
Select “Download Blocks as Image” and it downloads a graphic image of all of your blocks – which you can then print out if you want – finally!!!!!!
(FYI – my posting here on this blog is sparse for a little while longer. Been remodeling our kitchen which means lots of time and living in a mess. But I have gotten a lot of work done on Volume 4 of the App Inventor guide. Hope to introduce Volume 4 in about one month – with many neat features coming!)