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

Text Blocks


In the Text drawer, we find blocks related to manipulating strings—strings being letters and spaces—in other words, words. There are currently 19 blocks in the Text drawer (see the top few in the following screenshot). We buzz through these for you with examples as warranted.

text: This block, the top one in the drawer, holds strings, and we can cram thousands of words in just one of these, so it has practically no limit so far as using it in an app is concerned. To put text in it, right-click on the lower text below (the word text is the default value), and you can change it to whatever you like.

join: Joins two strings. Use it as shown in the next screenshot, which produces a label reading: This is a test and it was fun., and put a space at the end of test so that it and and will not run together.

By the way, the small triangles on the previous text blocks will often appear on blocks—they're simply shortcuts so that you can change the type to a related type. For example...