screencasts | App Inventor Blog

Learn App Inventor with Video Tutorials

Posted on August 18, 2012 by wolber

App Inventor Book available at Amazon

Check out appinventor.org/projects. I’ve added video screencast lessons and other teaching materials to complement the original App Inventor tutorials. These are the tutorials originally written for the App Inventor site and then refined for the book App Inventor: Create your own Android Apps (which I co-authored with App Inventor creators Hal Abelson, Ellen Spertus, and Liz Looney). I’ve also added some new video tutorials not found in the book, one for an arcade shooting game (see above) and one for a note-taking app.

The video is best watched full screen HD, and each tutorial is split into 5 minute portions.

Filed under: screencasts, teaching | Tagged: android, app inventor, programming | 2 Comments »

QR Codes anyone can download

Posted on October 10, 2010 by wolber

When you package an app in App Inventor and choose “Show Barcode” it generates a QR code that you can use to allow others to install your app. Unfortunately, people can only install it if they are App Inventor users. This is especially problematic while App Inventor is in its invite-required mode.

There is a work-around. This screencast demonstrates a process for downloading an android executable (.apk) from app inventor, getting it on the cloud, and generating a QR code that others can download.

Filed under: screencasts | Tagged: android, app inventor, screencast | 2 Comments »

Computing Distance from GPS points in App Inventor

Posted on September 30, 2010 by wolber

With App Inventor, you can create apps that use the LocationSensor to get the phone’s GPS coordinates. Some of my students have been writing apps to perform such public services as finding the closest pub from their current location. To compute this, they need to convert to GPS lat/long coordinates into a distance in miles.

To help them, I created these quick and dirty screencasts demonstrating how to find a formula on the web then convert it into an app inventor program: