By Derek Banas
Android Development for Beginners
Android Development for Beginners 2
I cover Location Sensor, global variables, changing label text, working with strings, Sound, Buttons, Event Handling, Text to Speech, Vibration, Accelerometers, Orientation changes, Dialog boxes, executing activities, and so much more.
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In the next 2 parts of my App Inventor video tutorial I will take a step back and cover a bunch of topics in general. I’ll spend a lot of time showing how to use the App Inventor ActivityStarter. We’ll see how to open other App Inventor apps, browsers, email, Google Maps, YouTube and more.
Android Development for Beginners 4
The Blocks used are Here : http://goo.gl/E7j92f
Best Android Book : http://goo.gl/uPhXFI
In this tutorial I’ll finish up the app I made in the last part. I’ll continue to cover event handling, sliders, and notifier. I’ll also cover how to open other App Inventor apps, browsers, email, Google Maps, YouTube and more.
All the blocks I drew in the video follow below the video to help. Next time I will create an app that will show how to display audio, video, images and more locally and across the internet.
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tutorial I thought it would be fun to make 2 apps. I make an app that grabs weather map data dynamically and displays it. I also make an app that shows how to use the camera, image picker and TinyDB with App Inventor.
I got the maps from the Weather Underground and weather.com. All together I show how to display images from the internet, take pictures, retrieve images from the gallery, store pictures in TinyDB, resize your app to fit any device and more. The blocks used can be found under the video below.
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this tutorial I decided to make an Android Beat Box App. It could also be converted into a voice note app, or anything else that would benefit from being able to record and later play back sounds.
I’ll specifically cover how to use the Android SoundRecorder, Player, take another look at using list, teach more about logic and incremental programming. All of the blocks used can be found below after the video. The answer for the Reset Button homework is also down there.
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tutorial I’ll show you most of what you need to know for drawing Android buttons for your interfaces. I’ll be using a free program called Inkscape to draw 6 buttons. I did my best to cover all of the most common techniques you will need in this one tutorial.
If you want to know more about Inkscape, I have an Inkscape Video Tutorial that goes over most everything you can do with Inkscape. Here is the finished vector art from this tutorial.
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of my tutorial I’ll show you how to make an Android toolbar and then show how to switch between screens in App Inventor.
We’ll finish up the icons we made in the previous tutorial. You can download them here. Then I’ll shrink them to size in Photoshop. Then we’ll put the toolbar together in App Inventor and use them to switch screens. The blocks used can be found after the video below.
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Posted by Derek Banas on Feb 15, 2014 in Android Development Tutorial | 23 comments
This is the first video in a series in which we will make a professional weather app for Android. In this video I will show how to parse JSON Data with App Inventor. I also cover the App Inventor Web component, using Location Sensor, converting JSON data into an App Inventor List and much more.
I pull all the weather data from weather.gov. If you want international weather data I’d use the JSON feed from the Weather Underground. All of the blocks follow the video.
http://maps.google.com/maps/api/geocode/json?address=patra%20achaia%20greece&sensor=false
he activity called to turn on GPS on Android device : android.settings.LOCATION_SOURCE_SETTINGS
Design for the Android Weather App
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part of my App Inventor tutorial I will start covering Android interface design. I want the weather app we have been creating in parts 9 and 10 of this series to look very nice.
Here I’ll show you how I created the layout and I’ll also walk you through the techniques needed to draw all of your icons in Inkscape. The vector art is available here. Here is an Inkscape video tutorial if you’d like to learn more.
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I’ll focus on creating App Inventor interfaces. I’ll take the vector art I made in the last tutorial and convert it into a App Inventor interface.
I create regular non-App Inventor interfaces in pretty much exactly the same way. Here is the original vector art I created. Here is the finished transparent PNGs I made in this video. The component information follows the video.
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this part of my App Inventor video tutorial I pretty much finish the Android Weather app. I cover how to create a dynamic interface, pull data from a web service, work with colors and cover logic in App Inventor. This is basically a large review of everything I have covered while making my Android Weather app in App Inventor here.
All of the settings for the Design View and all the blocks used follow the video below.
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his video I completely finish the Android weather app. I show how to make App Inventor wait for an operation to complete before proceeding. We also will allow the user to pull up latitude and longitude data when they enter their city and state. We use that data to pull current weather data. We teach are app to speak the weather to us. We look at many ways to manipulate text.
I have the finished app here. All the blocks are available below.
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Posted by Derek Banas on Mar 16, 2014 in Android Development Tutorial | 2 comments
In this part of my App Inventor tutorial I will create an Android contact app. Through making this app I will cover most everything about using Lists, List Pickers, TinyDB, TinyWebDB, Fusion Tables, and Texting. I start off simply here by focusing on creating Lists through an interface.
The design used as well as all the blocks can be found below the video. Feel free to leave requests for anything else you’d like to see.
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this part of my App Inventor tutorial I show how to do something that has been requested many times. I’ll show how to share a database between multiple screens with App Inventor.
One of you asked me to keep this very simple and so I will. I’ll show how to add, update and remove data from a database from multiple screens. All of the blocks used follow the video below.
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this part of my App Inventor tutorial, I will provide an App Inventor TinyWebDB Example. This one should be fun. We’ll be making a chat application that I call IncognitoEx. It will allow you to chat with anyone who also has the app. Here is the APK if you want to try it out.
It allows you to send and receive messages. You can find the messages here You can even make your own TinyWebDB web service by following the directions here Creating a Custom TinyWebDB Service. All of the blocks can be found after the video below.
http://appinvtinywebdb.appspot.com/
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this part of my App Inventor video tutorial I will provide an App Inventor Texting Example. I have been asked for the easiest way to make a texting app and this is it.
The app will allow you to send texts, receive texts, and also send out an alert to the sender if you are busy. I decided to make this app right out of my head to help those people that have questions about the thought process during programming. All of the blocks used can be found below after the video. Here is the finished app if you want it.
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this part of my App Inventor tutorial I will answer a bunch of questions. I’ll cover how to plan an application so that you can cut down on errors and have no problem with the blocks.
I will also show how to make a Android contacts app that store lists of people. You’ll also store that information in a TinyWebDB. We will then be able to update lists of lists on other screens. All the blocks are after the video below.
First Use Case Descriptions
Write a Description : Update List Picker
- When the user clicks Add Contact
- Do we have a contact to add?
- If so, create a list that will contain the contacts info
- Add the contact list of data to the master list
- Update the list picker
- When the List Picker is updated
- Create empty string that contains the picker elements
- Make sure the master list has contacts in it
- Add each contacts name to the list pickers element list
- Add the element list to the list picker
First App Inventor Contact App Blocks
Click the image below to enlarge it
Second Use Case Descriptions
Write a Description : Save Data to TinyWebDB
- Catch any web service errors
- Get data from the web service when the app loads
- When data is received if it is a list and it has the correct tag store the data and update the list picker
- If the data should be updated check that it is a list and then store it in the TinyWebDB
Second App Inventor Contact App Blocks
Click the image below to enlarge it
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Posted by Derek Banas on Apr 7, 2014 in Android Development Tutorial | 14 comments
In this video I will finish the Android Contact App I started in the last video. The goal of this tutorial is to keep everything simple, but to teach numerous things.
I’ll show you how to create lists of contacts, which will contain a list of information on each contact. Will save these contacts to a database online. We’ll also be able to edit it from multiple screens. After this video you’ll be able to create lists of contacts, edit contacts and delete them, with everything stored online.
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this video tutorial I will provide you with an App Inventor Paint App example tutorial. I make the entire app in this one video.
Specifically we’ll look at what we can do with the canvas component. It allows you to draw curves, straight lines, circles, text and text on an angle. We’ll make a palette of colors, provide for the ability to load and save files to a database. All of the blocks used follow the video below. Here is the finished app for download.
CONNECT APP INVENTOR TO MYSQL DATABASE
this tutorial I want to show you how to connect App Inventor to a MySQL database using PHP. I tried to keep everything as simple as possible while at the same time teaching enough so that you can do anything.
You’ll be able to submit to, update and then receive a CSV file from the database using the PHP files below. You’ll also be able to limit access to data simply by creating a different PHP file for each person that would need to access the database. Everything you need can be found below.
APP INVENTOR CANVAS GAME
Posted by Derek Banas on May 20, 2014 in Android Development Tutorial | 8 comments
In this part of my App Inventor video tutorial I make a App Inventor canvas game. The game is a simple paddle ball game.
You’ll learn about image sprites, how App Inventor animation works and all the cool built in features included with AI. With Image Sprite, Ball and Canvas you can make some pretty nice games. I keep everything simple so that it is easy to understand. All of the blocks follow the video below.
CONVERT APP INVENTOR TO JAVA 2
Posted by Derek Banas on May 26, 2014 in Android Development Tutorial | 18 comments
In this video I will finish up converting my App Inventor app into regular Java. If you missed the first video you must watch it first.
Not only will we finish the app, but I’ll also show how to install Ai2LiveComplete, which is a version of App Inventor that adds a ton of additional functionality and also doesn’t require an internet connection. The full list of what we will learn and the code follows the video below.