Book Image

Google App Inventor

By : Ralph Roberts
Book Image

Google App Inventor

By: Ralph Roberts

Overview of this book

<center><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/UgRhYG_bvW8" width="500" height="315" frameborder="0"></iframe></center> <p>The number of mobile apps has grown exponentially in the last two years. If you want to join the crowd, Google’s App Inventor is the easiest and best tool for you to get started with. It is a tool to create Android phone apps and uses a graphical user interface, and drag and drop methods to create apps. It’s so simple that anyone can build an app.<br /><br />Learn how Google App Inventor eliminates the mystery around programming. It is a visual language, where we simply drag and drop blocks (graphic elements representing blocks of code) in various combinations to give us applications that run on our phones or other Android-based devices. No programming background is required. Playing with blocks has never been more fun!<br /><br />The emphasis is on creating apps that work and that you understand fully. The first part of the book gives you a sound foundation in the basics, and lots of tips on how to use App Inventor. The second part is all about creating complete apps ready for real world use. The book includes apps that communicate, use databases to remember, surf the Web and other networks, use GPS and various sensors on your phone, and let you write or play games.</p>
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Google App Inventor
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Chapter 3. Playing with Blocks

When I was a little boy, I loved playing with alphabet blocks. Bet you did also. Well, App Inventor brings that joy back—we get to play with blocks again!

Blocks of code, but we never have to see the code, let us tell the components what we want them to accomplish. It's all visual now, dragging-and-dropping blocks on our computer screen into various simple configurations.

We're actually programming (shhh! Don't tell anyone!). It doesn't look like programming, and you certainly don't have to know much about programming technicalities to create powerful and complex programs (that is, in operations and not in the building of them).

Blocks are simply the logic that instructs the component services how to act and in what order tasks happen.

In this chapter, we look at the types of blocks and how they are used, and find our way around in the App Inventor Blocks Editor.

In this chapter, specifically, we will learn:

  • The Blocks Editor

  • Definition blocks

  • Text blocks

  • List blocks...