andrew's blog

App Inventor Goes Wireless!

andrew — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 02:58:07 +0000

We are very excited to be able to announce that...

Starting with today’s release of MIT App Inventor, v132, you no longer need a USB cable to connect your phone to your computer. We have added the option to connect the phone to the computer wirelessly. Not only does this avoid the cable, it also eliminates the often tedious process (on Windows) of finding, downloading, and installing drivers specific to your device. Now all you need now is a wireless (WiFi) network that your phone or device and your computer can both access.

The first step to use App Inventor wirelessly is to download the MIT AICompanion from the Google Play Store. You start this App like any other Android App. The Blocks Editor now has a new “WiFI” choice in the “Connect to Device” menu. When you select that you will receive a six letter code which you enter into the MIT AICompanion to connect the phone to the PC. You are also shown a QR Code which you can use If your phone has a camera and a Bar Code Scanning Application. You can find more information and detailed documentation in the wireless setup instructions.

The USB option is still there, same as before. But we expect that most App Inventor users will use the wireless method, which in general will be easier to set up and will give better performance. There may be some situations where wireless won’t work well -- such as when there’s no local wireless network, or the wireless network has poor performance. But we recommend that everyone start out by trying wireless to see if it works for you.

Again, we are enthusiastic about this new feature, and we hope this makes your App Inventor experience easier and more productive. Please give us your feedback on the forums and report any problems or issues you may encounter.

H*app*y Inventing
The MIT App Inventor Team

App Inventor Community Gallery from UMass-Lowell & USF Seeks More Beta Testers

andrew — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 20:04:13 +0000

Our friends and co-developers of the App Inventor Community Gallery have been hard at work and are seeking more beta testers to load test, test the usability, and as importantly, to populate the Gallery with a range of interesting apps.

The App Inventor Community Gallery is a site for sharing the code for apps you create, finding and learning from the apps built by others, and in general collaborating with other App Inventor developers. It is like Google Play, but all open source and all App Inventor apps.

The Gallery is currently in beta-release. It is being developed as a collaborative project involving UMass-Lowell, the University of San Francisco, and MIT. Its initial development was led by Fred Martin and Derrell Lipman of UMass-Lowell.

USF, led by David Wolber and Vincent Zhang, is now leading the development in collaboration with Martin, Lipman and Paul Geromini of UMass-Lowell. The team is improving the site and gradually scaling it up for use by the thousands of App Inventor users, students, and educators. The goal is to open the site publicly by the end of 2012.

Running your own App Inventor service

andrew — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 22:51:28 +0000

Starting today, the Center for Mobile Learning is distributing Java Archive (JAR) files that let people run their own versions of App Inventor on Google App Engine.

We're still planning to deploy a public App Inventor service some time in the first quarter of 2012, to replace the service that Google will be turning off at the end of December. But we know that many people would like to use App Inventor during the transition period. To help with this, we will be distributing files that allow you to set up your own instance of App Inventor to support a small user community. For example,

University faculty might deploy an App Inventor service for students in their classes.
School IT departments might deploy an App Inventor service for students in the school.
Computer hobbyists might deploy an App Inventor service for their private use or to share with friends.

The JAR files we are starting to distribute today are early prototypes that we are releasing for testing purposes: both testing for us, to identify bugs and other issues, and testing for you to determine whether running your own service would be appropriate during the transition period.

Using these files requires knowledge of App Engine and the willingness/ability to support the load and costs of running AppEngine services. Also, the code is still in an experimental state. We can not guarantee that these files will be bug-free, but we have done enough testing of them to release them publicly, and we'll do what we can to address bugs and release updates in a timely manner.

We've also created a discussion forum at

http://groups.google.com/group/mit-appinventor-jars

where people can share experiences with using these files, and -- especially important -- to report bugs that we need to deal with both for the JAR files and the public App Inventor service we're working on.

You can learn more about the App Inventor JAR files and how to get them at

https://docs.google.com/document/d/124V0q-Jzs8n9LqAlFKnSWxGLei_KZAUQGJUZ...