Google’s App Inventor has exited its closed-beta, meaning the drag & drop Android app creator tool is now open to anybody with a Google account. Announced back in July 2010, App Inventor requires no real programming knowledge, instead using preset functionality blocks that can be shuffled around to create software.
Despite that simple premise, the apps themselves can be just as complex as those coded from scratch; titles can be capable of GPS awareness, integration with the Android handset’s phone functionality, internet connectivity and more. You can log in and try App Inventor here.
as I said elsewhere:
I have been active in the App Inventor community for a few months. I built various apps, an experience calculator for FFXIII, an app that looks up Windows error codes and another that looks up ATM machine error codes and various other apps to get my head around what it can do. It should be a great way to prototype.
and it is a great teaching tool. I found teaching kids with the Lego block programming language that comes with Lego robots to work well.
and App Inventor now works with the Lego RCX over bluetooth.
I took the EXP calculator and reimplemented using the SDK. App Inventor was way easier. The SDK does a lot more…
I’m going to look into apps written with App Inventor using apps written with the SDK soon. That should be interesting.
@greg on appinventor is there anyway to see the code of the app you created?
Yep. In the My projects tab you can select your project and then save the source.
now once you see that source, you may less that thrilled
unless you know Scheme and can decode the xml and other that describes the components 🙂
uhhh. I am not here often, you may want to look at the App Inventor Forum
http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/forum/