Overview of Google App Inventor Blocks

So I got my Google App Inventor invite last night, had a quick play this morning with the Hello World app, and then hit an issue as the App Inventor kept failing to connect to my phone with anything other than a new app project started from scratch… so rather than waste the morning variously rebooting my phone, mac, phone and mac, in various combinations, here’s a quick tour – without commentary for now – of some of the various blocks that the App Inventor editor supports…

First of all, the “built-in” blocks, that are always available:

Procedure definitions:

String manipulation:

List manipulation:

Maths blocks:

Logic blocks:

Control blocks:

Colour blocks:

Then there are the blocks associated with components that have been added to the app. So for example, there are various sensor related blocks:

Accelerometer blocks:

Location sensor:

Orientation sensor:

These being phone apps, phone functions are also handy. For example:

Phone calls:

Texting:

To make the phone related activities easier, I’m guessing the contacts and phone number picking utilities might be handy (though I’m not sure how you’d use them?)

Phone numbers:

Contacts:

There are also a range of social tools. For example:

Twitter:

(It occurs to me that the Twitter blocks use basic authentication rather than OAuth, which means any apps built using the Twitter login component as-is will break at the end of August when basic authentication to Twitter is switched off…)

Media components are supported too. For example:

<em<Sound and vibration:

Video:

Images:

Database facilities are also provided:

and timer related functions:

Then there are various blocks relating to screen components. For example:

Screen display:

Labels:

Button blocks:

Canvas blocks:

Text blocks:

Check boxes:

LIst pickers:

Then there are layout related blocks, such as:

Table layout:

Horizontal and vertical layout:

Okay – that’s enough for now… I’ll maybe have to try restarting my browser, rebooting my phone, and giving the actual creative site of app inventor a go again…;-)

PS I missed a couple of really interesting blocks…

Barcode scanner:

Speech recogniser blocks:

Text-to-speech:

Activity starter:

The help documentation describes the activity starter as follows:

A component that can launch an activity using the StartActivity method.

Activities that can be launched include:

starting other App Inventor for Android apps
starting the camera application
performing web search
opening a browser to a specified web page
opening the map application to a specified location

so it looks like quite a lot of scope for interacting, albeit loosely in the first instance, with other things on the phone? (See Activity starter notes for more…)

Something that’s listed as not quite ready yet is the TinyWebDB:

From demos posted on the Google group, it looks like you can use this as a proxy for web content – e.g. allowing a web app to post stuff into the DB, and then the inventor app to pull the results (and maybe make additional requests) via the web database. The representation format used to support comms between the app and the web database seems to be JSON.

For some outdated, but still informative, info about the various blocks, see component reference and blocks reference.