Open Source Development with App Inventor: Part 6 : Wrapping Up Series 1

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Part 6 of Open Source Development with App Inventor will be the last video that I'm going to record for now. Most of the basics have been covered, so I have decided to take a break from videos, and probably go back to writing more focused posts. In any case, don't expect much from me until the end of the summer!
If you have any topics that you'd like me to cover, and think it's worth making a video of it, please leave a comment.

The last couple of hangouts have been focused on the part of App Inventor that, in my opinion, is the most technically interesting: how incremental development happens in the REPL, which for us can either mean the emulator, or a connected device (via USB or wifi). I know little about that part, so I guess that's why I find it so interesting. If you want to know more about incremental development, you cannot miss out watching the hangout in May, in which Jeff talks about it, and also about the rendezvous server used with the Companion app(wifi mode). The video is here:



For more information on how Java interoperation is achieved through Kawa, the June hangout should help:



There are a number of very important topics for App Inventor development, and I briefly cover some of them in the video. Please use the mailing list for discussion, ranging from ideas or improvements, to stickier topics such as what the primary audience for App Inventor is, should the focus shift towards other targets, and so on.
There's been a number of new distributions appearing (if you follow the forums, you can see the work Hossein, Gary, or Dave Wolber are doing). These are all great, but it would also be great if, as a community, we can talk about how to best approach things and design for interoperability. A couple of good examples in the forums are the threads about the sqlite component, and a discussion titled the dangers of fragmentation. Please keep active in the forums and irc.

The last subject in this video briefly covers how to work with App Inventor 2 (codename: newblocks) from the github account.

And finally, here's the video for Part 6:




Enjoy!

Open Source Development with App Inventor: Part 5 : Your own Personal Companion

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In this part of the video series we are going to see how to package our own Companion app. This is the app that can be used with wifi for development purposes (no USB cable needed).





As explained in the video, the reason why you would want to create your own app is that the Companion contains a copy of each of the Components available in the system. If you develop a new component, this new guys and its blocks will not be available in an app distributed by MIT. You can create your own app by using an ant target available in the main build script:

ant PlayApp

Make sure that you manually uninstall any other Companion apps before installing the newly created one, especially if you have installed an app distributed by MIT. The reason is that the apps, even though they can have the same name, are going to be signed with different keys, and the phone might get a bit confused.


If for any reason you need a Companion app for an older version of App Inventor, you can create one using the MIT repo git tags. One thing I forgot to mention in the video is that to update the tags from the repo, you have to fetch them. This can be done by executing (assuming you have called the remote 'upstream'):

git fetch upstream

These are the steps to move to a different commit (in this case we use a tag, but a commit would work too), and create the new-old Companion app:

0. make sure you are in clean state, in master, and with all the latest from upstream (mit-cml)
1. sync with upstream to grab all the tags: git fetch upstream
2. checkout the tag you want to build the companion for: git checkout v133
  - this will put you in detached head mode
3. ant clean; ant; ant PlayApp
 - this creates: MIT Companion app.apk
4. git co master to go back to master.

 And that is all for this video, catch you in the next one!

Open Source Development with App Inventor: Part 4 : Android Activity Lifecycle

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The training site for Android is full of great resources. If you have an interest in Android development, I would recommend to go through all of the sections, but if your time is limited and you can only go through a bunch of them, you should not skip Managing the Activity Lifecycle.

Always keep the following figure in mind when developing and app, and App Inventor provides hooks to the Activity Lifecycle through the Form class:

Activity Lifecycle, from Android training site.

The following video shows those hooks, and the main interfaces used to that effect:





In the next video we will be showing how to package the Companion app from sources, and explaining why you would want to do that in first place.