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 taking a look from space


Start a new app in Design. I'm calling mine from_Space.

Drop in a button, a LocationSensor component, and an ActivityStarter.

With the ActivityStarter selected, fill in the top three fields in the Properties column as follows:

  • Action: android.intent.action.VIEW

  • ActivityClass: com.google.android.maps.MapsActivity

  • ActivityPackage: com.google.android.apps.maps

Now, we go to the Blocks Editor.

This is just a link app (that is, it opens Google map satellite view in our phone's browser), so we put everything in the Screen1.Initialize frame block.

The ActivityStarter parameters we specified on the Design page builds the URL to Google Maps using the latitude and longitude found by the location sensor as in the blocks we built previously.

The result opens our phone's browser and shows us the satellite view of our current location as mine currently in the next screenshot. The blue arrow shows my current location in my home (well, it's about 15 feet off, but that...