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By now you’ve probably heard of Google’s App Inventor for Android, a web-based development environment that’s meant to make it possible for non-developers to build their own Android applications. The technology has been in testing for a year, primarily with educational organizations, and may well be a boon for the Android ecosystem as students are introduced to the platform in the classroom. A report in the New York Times quotes project lead (and MIT professor) Harold Abelson as saying “These aren’t the slickest applications in the world… but they are ones ordinary people can make, often in a matter of minutes.” So does this mean Android’s millions of users are about to start programming for their own devices? Not quite.
I spent around 90 minutes this morning cranking away on a few test applications in App Inventor, and while I’m very excited about it, this is not going to be a walk in the park for “ordinary people”. Unless you’re looking to make an extremely basic application — think “Hello World” — you’re going to have to read through the documentation, and in some cases even the existing tutorials won’t be enough. That said, this will be absolutely perfect for the classroom environment for which it’s been tested in. The learning curve is not trivial, but this isn’t something that will take years to master, either.
Before I relay my experience, it’s worth giving a little context regarding my own programming background (or lack thereof). In high school I took a year of Visual Basic, which App Inventor reminds me of in a few ways, and I later took a couple of classes on C++, which hasn’t come into play at all here. I’ve never used Scratch, which App Inventor shares many similarities with. I’d consider myself far less experienced than any professional developer, but I’m probably more knowledgeable than your average Android user.
Getting started on App Inventor is easy relative to installing Eclipse and the Android SDK, but it’s still a bit involved. First you need to ensure that you’ve got the proper version of Java running; next, you install a client for your OS; then you have to change a few settings on your Android phone (allow for applications installed from Unknown Sources, enable Dev mode on the phone, etc.). Plug in the phone, log-in to App Inventor, allow the Java app to run, and you should be good to go. It may sound like a lot, but the whole process won’t take more than ten minutes if you know what you’re doing.
Once you’re off and running, you’ll find that App Inventor is broken into two parts: the Designer and the Blocks Editor. The documentation does a good job explaining the differences, but the gist is that you add components like buttons and text fields and adjust the layout of your application in the Designer (which is a web page), and do the actual drag-and-drop coding in the Blocks Editor (which is a Java app). You can deploy changes to your Android device, hooked to your computer via USB, in less than a minute.
My first (admittedly overambitious) idea was to 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. The basic layout was easy enough — I dragged a text box, a label, and a button to the design canvas, then tweaked the width and layout settings to make it look slightly less ugly. Then came the hard part: making those buttons actually do things, which marked my first introduction to the Blocks Editor.
The Blocks Editor reminds me of Apple’s Automator in that it lets you map out your app logic like a puzzle, though the former is obviously much more complex. Getting App Inventor to do what you want is sometimes very easy, assuming it already has a component for that task. Want to store the contents of a text field to a database when the user taps a button? It’s a cinch. Unfortunately, the list of available components sometimes has some frustrating omissions, which I quickly ran into.
Look (For The Right Components) Before You Leap
I initially planned to monitor TechCrunch headlines in my app using an RSS feed, which I assumed would be one of the available components. No dice — as far as I can tell there isn’t any RSS functionality baked in. However, the App Inventor does have some built-in Twitter components, including a search function — perhaps I could simply monitor the TechCrunch Twitter feed for headlines and run the user query against that? After dragging and dropping the proper components into to place (which took all of two minutes), I had the application spitting out Twitter search results for whatever query the user entered, which was very cool. But it’s trickier to monitor an individual Twitter account (I was getting results from all of Twitter), and it was quickly becoming apparent that I didn’t have enough experience with App Inventor to pull this project off. I’ve shelved it for later. Update:Looks like I could have used the join block to add the query and “from:techcrunch” to the search.
My second attempt was to build an application I’ll call Draw N’ Send. Given my initial setback, the application was to be nearly identical to the one produced with the App Inventor PaintPot tutorial, which allows the user to draw with a few colors on a blank canvas (I hoped to add the ability to email the resulting drawing via email). Things got off to a great start, as they often do when you have a step-by-step guide: I quickly got my colored buttons into place, and getting dots and lines to appear on the Canvas when the user dragged their finger on the screen was surprisingly straightforward. With the basic drawing functionality in place, I got ready to set up my email functionality. Which is when I hit roadblock number two: for some reason there’s currently no component to save the contents of a canvas to an image file, so I had nothing to email. So much for that idea.
Outlook
All of which boils down to say a few things. First, while this may be a development environment “for anyone”, it’s still one that you definitely have to learn before it becomes useful. And that is going to be a bit tricky, as there aren’t a ton of tutorials available yet (if you’re looking for more, check out USF Professor Dave Wolber’s Appinventor.org, which isn’t affiliated with Google).
The other key takeaway is that the variety of components offered in App Inventor still has a ways to go — and if the component you need isn’t there, you’re probably out of luck. Google says they’re working to add new ones, and down the line the Component Developer Kit will probably lead to a huge jump in available functionality. But for now, it’s definitely a good idea to get familiar with the available Functions before you start putting everything together. Whoops.
When new major versions of applications are released, they tend to include a bunch of new features that have been requested over the products lifespan. New features are nice, but this is not the only route we are taking with IP.Tracker 1.4. Of course, 1.4 will include lots of new features which we are sure you are bound to love, but we thought it would be equally important to go over every single interface within IP.Tracker and bring it up to a level of quality we’ve never done before.
As promised, we shall be going over different areas within IP.Tracker as they are nearing completion and explaining some of the changes you will find once you upgrade to IP.Tracker 1.4. Today we will be showing off the new interface within the Project Manager Admin CP.
Project Listing
First and foremost, the first screen you get to when you visit the Admin CP is the project listing, this simply lists the projects you have and provides links to edit them. I’d first of all like to remind you of the level of detail and quality we are putting into 1.4, we don’t regard this as an area that is used much, but we are putting the same amount of quality in all areas of 1.4!
Here is the current interface you are presented with if you have 1.3.x installed on your forums:
As you can see, it’s nothing special – as said in previous entries IP.Tracker 1.3 was a quick port to get Tracker working on IP.Board 3, now with 1.4 we have had the time to streamline and simplify all the interfaces.
Here is that exact same screen in the latest revision of 1.4:
As you can instantly see, everything has been slimmed down and made cleaner, only things which need to show are there, and the whole interface just looks a lot more friendly to use.
You may have noticed that in the 1.4 screenshot the sub-projects are no longer links underneath the project description, and you no longer have to click the project title to get to them. One of the main bits of feedback we received with 1.3 was there were simply too many clicks involved to get to the project you wanted. With 1.4 we’ve gone with an ‘all on one page’ approach, if a project has sub projects, a collapse icon appears next to the project title. When clicked, it slides down the sub-projects with all the same information you got with 1.3, and more.
We have also implemented the new control options that you will be familiar with if you own IP.Content, or been keeping up-to-date with the IP.Nexus development. These replace the IP.Board 3 circular drop-down icons with a set of 3 controls, 2 of which are common features (for the projects we have ‘add subproject’ and ‘edit project’), and 1 which provides the same drop-down found in earlier versions.
As you can also see, when hovering over a project you get a brief summary of the project statistics – something which we think may be useful! Now, this is where our favourite part comes into play, have you noticed how you can no longer see the usual drag icons you had in IP.Tracker 1.3 to reorder projects? This video below explains all! For better quality, please watch it fullscreen on YouTube, in 480p.
Editing a Project
The final interface we will show you today to do with projects is the edit screen, we will not show you much today as we have hidden several areas which we want to surprise you with in another blog entry. However, we will show comparison shots and go over the main changes.
Here is the interface you have been used to in IP.Tracker 1.3.
Now, we’re going to be honest here, this was possibly the worst interface in the whole of IP.Tracker, and we knew it had to be changed! We wanted an area which was easy to use and looked nice, and it couldn’t simply be a long list of form elements. It also had to be fluid enough to include extended areas that are not defined by default *hint hint*. We believe that products within the forum should all have the same look and feel, so we’ve taken what we feel are the best bits from various applications and merged them together. This is very early in the design change, and it will probably change quite a lot – but the same structure will be apparent throughout, so this is why we are showing you it now.
Now, being the evil developers we are, we will not be showing you any of the areas that are on the left (Additional Options, Versions, etc.) simply because they are all worthy of their own blog entry, and each area will get one in the coming weeks. There are also a few ‘tabs’ that have been skinned out of that screenshot, you’ll just have to wait and see
Recapping
So that’s our first development entry for IP.Tracker which shows you some of the new cool stuff we have planned! This entry is not necessarily about new features (even though some of the drag and drop is really cool), but more about showing you how we are going over every single interface and completely revamping it. We hope you like the changes you’ve seen, and we can’t wait to show you more!
There’s a plain page or not at all a page r if not an awkward page available to show the information of your company. How does this sound? Does it seem you don’t even exist? Well that’s true. With the huge impact of the World Wide Web in our day to day lives. It has become imperative for all of us to make use the designing tools in order to develop a website for the company and then flaunt it.
This technology has a huge impact in increasing your customer base since it is a source of your existence easily accessible to your users at any point of time. The creativity lies in the arrangement of your content on your website and indeed the display as well.
The reason behind the development of a website is to have all the various files on various servers available and display the information and the user friendly options to the visitor visiting the site at convenience. For a simple display of images and text languages like HTML/XML can be used. If an another scenario a website is intended to be a highly graphical equipped one, then the use of much complex software such as flash come in to the picture.
Website development
It is imperative to understand the needs being accomplished by the web design created. What would that need be? Firstly, you would want your potential customers to be glued on your website. They should have all the information easily accessible and in a presentable manner. Well to make that possible, all we do for you is go through a planned approach so that the result does not disappoint you.
A website is no different from a book which implies that when you try to read a book, you prefer to have the access to the information at ease. Similarly, the creation of the website requires the context to be in place in order to make the clients aware of your knowledge being imparted and then, follows the designing phase. You have the framework ready and now you need to understand why the website is being created. If it’s a source of enlightening the knowledge of the audience, a basic website would satisfy. In the other case, is you are having it as a source to have transaction with the clients, a dynamic website would be preferred. A clear idea of the targeted audience and style of displaying is essential.
Few steps to take and another source of opening your doors to the potential customer is achieved!
By now you’ve probably heard of Google’s 
