MIT Announces App Inventor Open Beta Preview

At the end of 2010, Google Introduced App Inventor, a web based tool allowing non-programmers to easily design Android applications, before phasing it out at the end of 2011. Google eventually made App Inventor open source and it is now handled by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) which planned to make a beta version of App Inventor available to the general public in Q1 2012. This happened yesterday, as the MIT App Inventor service is now open to everyone and all you will need is a Google ID for log-in such as a gmail account. There is no need to install any software as was the case with the original version of App Inventor and everything is handled in the web browser. Since this is the first release, MIT explains that there may be issues due to the load from a large number of users and there may be […]

App Inventor for Android is Now Open Source

Android App Inventor has been phased out by Google some weeks ago. But it is not dead yet, as Google made it open source and it is hosted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The developers of App Inventor said they won’t be accepting contributions to the source code for now, but they plan to accept other developers contribution once the project is “complete and deployed to a large-scale public server”. App Inventor is a tool that allows non-programmer to design applications for Android via a web-based interface for designing Android apps without the need to get into Java programming with the Android software development kit. The projct is being transfered between Google and MIT, and you won’t be able to use App Inventor at the moment. MIT anticipates the public instance of App Inventor will be available for the general public to access some time in the first […]

Android App Inventor – Develop Android App Without Coding

[Update: Google phased out App Inventor, but made it open source. It is now hosted by MIT at http://appinventoredu.mit.edu/welcome-to-app-inventor-edu“] We have previously shown how to setup your environment to develop Android application using Eclipse. However, if you are not into Java programming and learning Android API but still want to develop (simple) Android applications, that’s still possible thanks to App Inventor. App Inventor will allow you to create the application UI in your web browser (The Designer), configure how your application behaves via a Java JNLP (Java Network Launching Protocol) applet (The Block Editor) and run your application in your Android phone/tablet or if you don’t have hardware in an emulator (The emulator). For Windows XP + Emulator, all you’ll have to do is to follow the instructions in http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/learn/setup/setupwindows.html and then you’ll be able to create some “Hello Kitty” application. First download the installer. Run appinventor_setup_installer_v_1_1.exe to install the […]