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

Changelog


As I've mentioned before, it's still early days in the development of App Inventor with updates (we get them automatically, remember) happening about once a month. The previous update—released on June 1, 2011—we covered in Chapter 5,Apps That Communicate

July 21, 2011—we got an update (dated as the July 20, 2011 build). This one has a couple of things many of us App inventors have been yearning for—the Webviewer component and the ability to use the Post method in the Web component. Let's take a quick look at both of those and the other changes in AI before we start creating Apps that know where they are.

Bringing web pages into our apps

As you recall, at the beginning of Chapter 7, Apps That Surf the Web, we built an eBay link app—that is, an app that does nothing other than use ActivityStarter to open a website. My eBay app now has over 4,000 downloads from Market, so many people seem to be finding it useful.

This technique works well and, if you choose a site already formatted...