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

Time for action two methods for searching Twitter


We start by formatting a nice screen (get the source for this one at http://arrsoft.com/examples/twitter.zip). The basic components needed are a textbox for the search term (see the next screenshot), a couple of buttons (for the Twitter component search and one for the ActivityStarter search), and a label for the search results. Also, drop in the non-visual components for Twitter and ActivityStarter.

Always take a little time to format the screen with horizontal arrangements—it's great practice.

In the blocks editor, the left column is all required for searching Twitter with the Twitter component. Button3.Click does the same thing currently better with just those two interior blocks (see the next screenshot).

To build your own or modify mine, here's what the block groups do:

  1. 1. Define global variable x to use in displaying a list of results from Twitter component search. It serves as an index to point to a specific item in a list.

  2. 2....