Sunday, 10 February 2013 19:03
Develop Android Application without Coding
App Inventor is an application use to develop Android application without programming. Its graphical interface is very similar to Scratch that allow users to drag and drop visual objects to develop application which runs on many mobile devices.
Google released App Inventor on December 15, 2010 and terminated as the Google product on August 2011. App Inventor is maintained by Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the code is become "Open Source".
Prerequisite
- Gmail account
- Computer installing with Java
- Browser such as Mozilla Firefox，Apple Safari，Google Chrome ，IE6 and higher
Download and install App Inventor
- Download App Inventor. File (appinventor_setup_installer_v_1_2.exe) size is about 92MB
- Double click appinventor_setup_installer_v_1_2.exe to start installing App Inventor.
- Go to http://beta.appinventor.mit.edu/ an login with Gmail account
- A blank project will appear if this is the first time to use App Inventor
- Click on New button to start Designer
- Give it a new project name and now you can start the GUI design as shown in figure below
Open the Blocks Editor and connect to the emulator
Blocks Editor runs in a seperate window, assign behaviors to your components, such as trigger events when users taps a button. In other way, Blocks Editor open an emulator to emulate the program.
- Click Open the Blocks Editor at the top right corner of browser to start download Blocks Editor
- It is a very small file with the JAVA jnlp extension (certain download accelerator may not download the file correctly, use normal download instead)
- Double click the jnlp file to open with JAVA upon finished downloading
- JAVA will start another download process, wait for about 30 seconds and more to finish the download
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Blocks Editor will appear as shown in figure below
- Click on New emulator button, to start the Android emulator. Starting the emulator can take a couple of minutes
- You may want to use your mouse to unlock the device by dragging the green lock button to the right as shown in figure below
- Click on Connect to device and select an emulator from the dropdown list
- A yellow arrow start flashing
- The yellow arrow will stop moving and change to green when it's all done
- Look at the emulated phone screen, your program is running
- Return to Designer, click on Save button to save your project
- Click on Package for Phone and select Download to this computer from the dropdown list to save the project as .apk file
- You may want to send your design to your phone by select Download to connected phone from the dropdown list
