This week several lightbulbs went off for me. The biggest one was when I realized that while multiple screens weren’t “available” in the app inventor interface, you could simulate different screens by making different components visible and invisible at different times. I heavily used this feature in this week’s app design.
I also discovered the wonders of calling lists. I’d been wondering how these worked since working with a very basic one several weeks ago, and last week wondered if you could call image files from it. This week showed you can! The logic behind this design interface continues to amaze me at its simplicity. I always thought programming was complicated and difficult, but in this one, at least, I’m finding it very intuitive and easy to understand. I probably have reflected on that statement before, but as someone who has done some HTML work, a bit of PHP hacking, and a bit of SQL report writing, the app inventor interface is simply the easiest “language” I’ve used yet.
I’m excited about figuring out my personal project for the rest of the semester. The possibilities are truly limitless with app designing — well as much as can be done with the app inventor interface. I discovered the hard way this week that it has uploaded file size and total app file size limitations, which limits a lot of multimedia-rich ideas.