The Programmers are coming!

Posted on July 16, 2010 by wolber

Google has targeted education with App Inventor, but its clear that the tool will attract major interest from programmers and web designer/developers. Programmers see the potential because of the the TinyWebDB component which allows an App Inventor apps to communicate with web services.

Early adopter Dean Sanvitale has already built an RSS reader app and a Flickr explorer app. He did this by modifying a sample “tinywebdb-compliant” web service to create http://tinywebdbplus.appspot.com/ then writing an App Inventor client that talks to it. The pic on the right is his RSS reader app running in an emulator.

For more on how to build App Inventor (tinywebdb-) compliant web services, as well as sample source code, see http://appinventor.org/talking-to-an-api and http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/learn/reference/other/tinywebdb.html (The sample is written in Python/App Engine)

Good work Dean and, programmers, rev your engines!

Filed under: api communication | Tagged: , , , | 1 Comment »

App Inventor: “No Text While Biking” App

Posted on July 16, 2010 by wolber

Filed under: screencasts, students, texting | Tagged: , , , | 3 Comments »

App Eliza Chat-Bot

Posted on July 14, 2010 by wolber

Public domain pic of Sigmund Freud

Some great apps are beginning to come out as people get their hands on App Inventor. Robert Oschler of Android Technologies, started with App Inventor yesterday and created a chat-bot on his first day with the tool. The app he built, App Eliza, is

“just like the famous ELIZA chat-bot program relies on ambiguity to appear smarter than it is. It uses simple text parsing and matching to respond to certain key phrases and trigger words, especially in relation to feelings and family, while trying to “fake it” the rest of the time.”

It even logs the sessions to Twitter!

Robert’s take on it is this:

But the app itself is not important. It’s importance lies squarely in the fact that it proves without a doubt that you can create serious feature-rich Android applications with AppInventor in an astonishingly short period of time, including apps that use advanced powerful techniques like speech recognition and text to speech on a mobile computing platform.

The app is up for download on Robert’s site.

Nice work Robert! And nice work App Inventor team– you have built a creativity tool of the first order!

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A TechCrunch “Posts API” App

Posted on July 13, 2010 by wolber

App Inventor for Android app that talks to TechCrunch API

Jason Kincaid posted an excellent  TechCrunch article on App Inventor and his initial experience. His first idea was to create create “an application that would allow a user to monitor TechCrunch headlines for keywords, which could come in handy if a startup wanted to get notified whenever we wrote a post about them.”

He quickly was stymied, realizing that App Inventor doesn’t yet have an RSS feed component. App Inventor does have a more general web service component, however, TinyWebDB. I used it, and App Engine for Python, to code up a simplified App Inventor version of his idea, a TechCrunch Posts API Android Client.

You can download the app and its source code at the link above. The app took me 20 minutes to create.

The sample doesn’t demonstrate what a non-programmer can do with App Inventor, as I had to write some Python code. It does demonstrate how App Inventor can be used by programmers and/or teams with a programmer to quickly develop and prototype apps.

Filed under: api communication | Tagged: , , , , | 1 Comment »

App Inventor at Community Colleges

Posted on July 7, 2010 by wolber

I just finished teaching a 5-day App Inventor workshop at MPICT, a conference for computer science and IT community college teachers in the Northwest US. App Inventor was a hit– many of the instructors plan to incorporate App Inventor in their courses.

What I learned is our community colleges are in good hands: what a fantastic group of teachers! I learned a great deal about teaching in general and teaching beginning CS courses specifically.

Filed under: teaching, Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , | 2 Comments »

USF App Inventor Contest

Posted on June 26, 2010 by wolber

Photos from the contest

We recently held a programming contest for my App Inventor for Android programming class. The students in the class were non-techies: their fields of study included history, communications, literature, media, business– just about every major in the university other than computer science. The folks from Google’s App Inventor team and some USF Administrators served as judges. The winning team created DroidMuni, an app that gives you personalized “next bus times” information about your MUNI bus line. Other apps included:

Park It
No Text While Driving
FrontlineSMS
Dating AppVice
Make it Count

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App Inventor at USF (the video)

Posted on June 17, 2010 by wolber

Google featured yours truly and Chris Witte, one of the students in my original App Inventor class, in this video. The clip was played at the Google booth during the ACM Conference on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE 2010).

Filed under: students, teaching | Tagged: , , , | 1 Comment »

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