The first app I made from scratch using app inventor was touch to talk; a basic soundboard which would allow a child with speech problems to communicate simple phrases, such as the desire for something to eat or drink.
Four global variables were created, and linked to the 4 button groups on the screen. This meant that if a mistake was made, it could be rectified by simply choosing a different button in the same button group. It also meant that the selections would be read out in a predefined order, regardless of what order they were entered. Upon hitting the 'Speak' button, the variables were read out by the TextToSpeech component from the 'Other Stuff' palette.
Not all of the app is shown on the emulator, as the screen is smaller than that of my phone, and as I mentioned in the previous post, I have been designing the apps using my phone for testing. Later on, I will hopefully learn to create apps that automatically adjust to the native screen size.
After making the molemash tutorial app, I added a few features to it. Instead of a mole moving around the screen, I had a picture of my girlfriend, and had her record sounds which play at random when a point is scored (although not every time a point is scored, as this quickly became irritating!). I also created levels, so that the speed at which the sprite moved around increased with every ten points scored. Finally, I included a hits to misses ratio, which rated the players accuracy.
A screenshot of the app running on the App Inventor emulator is shown below. I found that connecting the blocks editor to my phone, and testing apps on that was preferrable, and only used the emulator to take screenshots.
As an Electronic Engineering student due to start my final year in October this year, I have decided that my final year project will involve developing an app for Android (I have already got a particular program in mind, but will elaborate on that later). My supervisor has suggested that I maintain a blog of my experiences, as it will hopefully serve as a useful reminder of what I have done, and may be useful to future students.
I have purchased a Samsung Galaxy S2, since it comes with the features (accelerometer, magnetometer, GPS) required for the final app I intend to make. The first step so far has been to play around with Google's App Inventor service, and complete the provided tutorials.
App Inventor is designed for complete beginners, and requires no previous programming experience (I have a little C++ knowledge, but having carried out some research it seems that Java is the preferred language for Android, and Eclipse the most highly recommended IDE). It is a good way to get a general feel for how an app comes together, but its abilities are limited, and apps built using App Inventor can not be uploaded to the Android marketplace.
Having completed most of the tutorials, and built a few basic apps of my own (see later posts for details), the next step will be to install Eclipse, download the Android SDK, and start to code apps using Java.
