The perfect app building companion
Youth Radio's Mobile Action Lab
Youth Radio is an Oakland, CA organization which promotes young people’s intellectual, creative, and professional growth through education and access to media. They’ve won a MacArthur Digital Media and Learning Award and now they’re adding mobile apps to their game and and using App Inventor to make it happen.
Here’s a clip about them:
Filed under: students, success stories, teaching | Tagged: android, app inventor, apps | 2 Comments »
Here are a couple of question from a reader of my appinventorapi.com blog, which focuses on app inventor apps that store/retrieve data from a web database or API. The second question specifically asks about storing multiple timestamps, e.g., if you were tracking your user’s activity or location. In general, it asks about how to store lists of data in a web database:
1. How can I check if a value is already stored in a TinywebDB ?
The only way to check for a value in the web db is to call TinyWebDB.getValue(tag). If there is no data value for the tag you send, the result in TinyWebDB.GotValue will be the empty string. You can check this by checking if the length of result is greater than 0.
2. Is it possible to store multiple arguments for one Tag at different time intervals ?(e.g.I save TAG 1, 2 and 3 right now it saves as an argument the current time of the system, then a few minutes or hours later I Save TAG 1,2 and 3 again and it puts a new a timestamp without overwriting the previous stored valued is this possible ? so at the end of the day if I check the Database I can have something like this Tag 1 (Time1, Time2, Time3, etc) for each stored value
Tinywebdb only stores one value for each tag. You can store a list as a value, however. So you could store different timestamps in a list, and store the entire list as a value of some tag. To implement this scheme, you need to load the list into your app using GetValue. Then call add item to list to add a new item (time stamp) to the list, then remember to call TinyWebDB.StoreValue to put the updated list back into the database.
For examples of storing lists of data using tinywebdb, check out the MakeQuiz/TakeQuiz sample chapter (ch 10), as well as the Database chapter (ch 22)
Filed under: how to | Tagged: android, app inventor | 1 Comment »
Who teaches App Inventor? I’ve started to put together a Google map with the basic information of the courses I know about. I’m still working through emails and groups to collect info about people, so please send me your name, course title and description to be added. It looks like a bunch of courses sprouting up this fall so the map should be filling up…here’s a snapshot of the map in Google Earth:
Filed under: teaching | Tagged: android, app inventor, map, teaching | 4 Comments »
USF Student-Teachers at the Technovation Pitch-Night
No women in computer science? Not so fast! The University of San Francisco’s App Inventor class is helping to encourage more women into the field. These four students, recent A-listers in the USF course, are now helping high school girls learn programming and entrepreneurship in Iridescent’s Technovation Challenge. Jenny Horowitz, Paige Carrington, Julie Cahill, and Melanie Garcia– Way to go!
For more info about the Tech Challenge, check out this PC World article
Filed under: students, success stories, teaching | Tagged: android, app inventor, iridescent, technovation, women | 12 Comments »
How do we get more women in computer science? App Inventor may be part of the answer.
This year’s Iridescent Technovation Challenge has expanded to NYC and Socal along with the Bay area. This is a program where high school girls spend two nights a week learning app development and entrepreneurship, aided by college students and young professionals. NYC’s program was featured in a PC Magazine article. Three USF students– Jenny Horowitz, Julia Cahill, and Melody Garcia– are instructors at the San Francisco Challenge taking place at Google’s SF offices.
Girls at the NYC Technovation Challenge
The nation-wide finals are May 21 in the Bay Area. I’ll be there!
Filed under: students, success stories | Tagged: android, app inventor, teaching, women | 2 Comments »
App Inventor Director Mark Friedman gave a great keynote talk at USF’s CS Night.
Our CS 107 students– non-cs majors with no prior programming experience– presented and demo’d their Android app projects alongside the seniors and MS students.
CS 107 students Jose Malave and Crystal Ferguson show their app
CS 107 student and filmmaker Angelo Taylor
CS 107 student Angelo Taylor documented the night with this short film, and librarian supreme Shawn Calhoun contributed these photos
Filed under: students, success stories | Tagged: android, app inventor, google, usf | 2 Comments »
Clive Thompson of Wired Magazine featured a USF student project in his article, 
Coding for the Masses. The article features Daniel Finnegan and his No Text While Driving app.
You can check out a refined version of the app as a tutorial on the App Inventor site, and check out a screencast of how to build it on my App Inventor youtube list.
Filed under: success stories, teaching, texting | Tagged: android, app inventor, creativity | 2 Comments »
The cat is out of the bag. There’s a primer out on how to publish an App Invent
or app in the Android market, via androidworld.it. It takes some work using the Java SDK and some command-line tools but it doesn’t look to awful.
The cat being out of the bag is big news and could help with the next step– one-click publishing directly from App Inventor.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: android market, app inventor | 10 Comments »
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 | 3 Comments »
App Inventor Blog 