Announcing availability of the 'newblocks' branch - on behalf of the MIT App Inventor team

[Jos Flores]

The MIT Center for Mobile Learning is pleased to announce the
availability of the 'newblocks' branch in our github repository. This
branch contains the integration work to bring the Blocks Editor to the
browser, and it's based on the Blockly library.

Note that this is a WORK IN PROGRESS. It is unfinished, and there will
be problems with it. It might change without warning, and projects
created with this version might not be compatible with other future
versions.
If you decide to package and distribute it, you will have to provide
the support that your users are going to need (which will be
considerable).
MIT will not provide any kind of project/user support until the
software is final, and can be provided as a service (in the same way
that App Inventor 'classic' is provided today).

We would love this community to get involved in the development
effort. We have been working very hard on this, and all your feedback
and contributions will be highly appreciated.
Feel free to use github issues in the main repository to report bugs
and features.

We hope you have fun with newblocks!

The App Inventor team at MIT.

[Gary Frederick]

!!!

On Wednesday, May 1, 2013 5:30:33 PM UTC-5, Jos wrote:

The MIT Center for Mobile Learning is pleased to announce the
availability of the 'newblocks' branch in our github repository. This
branch contains the integration work to bring the Blocks Editor to the
browser, and it's based on the Blockly library.

!!!

 

Note that this is a WORK IN PROGRESS. It is unfinished, and there will
be problems with it. It might change without warning, and projects
created with this version might not be compatible with other future
versions.

:-)

 

If you decide to package and distribute it, you will have to provide
the support that your users are going to need (which will be
considerable).

Hmmm. That could be fun.

 

MIT will not provide any kind of project/user support until the
software is final, and can be provided as a service (in the same way
that App Inventor 'classic' is provided today).

Sounds reasonable.

 

We would love this community to get involved in the development
effort. We have been working very hard on this, and all your feedback
and contributions will be highly appreciated.

It build very easily. I dragged a few blocks around. I need to find time to do more!!!

 

Feel free to use github issues in the main repository to report bugs
and features.

bugs? It has bugs???

;-)

 

We hope you have fun with newblocks!

So far I am.

Gary

ai4a

[Gary Frederick]

I dumped V1.5.0.zip into the ai4a configurations area on sourceforge. It builds just like the old version and installs and runs the same.

No support for those that are brave and try it.

I only had a few minutes with the new blocks editor. It looks good and is FAST. Now I need to find out how to generate an apk.

Are there instructions or at least an ant target for building the aiplayapp Companion?

Do I need the Rendezvous Server and what exactly does it do?

Good stuff! This should kick it up a notch ;-)

Gary

[Jeffrey Schiller]

"PlayApp" is the name of the ant target to build the Companion App (which in new blocks is called MIT NewBlocks Companion). Both App Inventor "Classic" and newblocks use the same rendezvous server located rendezvous.appinventor.mit.edu, though they use it is slightly different ways.

If folks are interested, I can do a talk on how the wireless code works, both in classic and newblocks, along with the role of the rendezvous server.

-Jeff

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_______________________________________________________________________

Jeffrey I. Schiller

Information Services and Technology

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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_______________________________________________________________________

[Jos Flores]

Jeff, you are on for the next hangout!

that will be on Saturday the 18th, if that suits you.

cheers,
José

[Jos Flores]

Gary, are you going to confuse your users by naming it 1.5? Note that
this won't be production ready in a while... are you planning to keep
releasing 1.4.xxx with new MIT releases of classic?

cheers,
José

[Gary Frederick]

Thanks Jeff, I am VERY INTERESTED in all I can learn about wireless and about the rendezvous server.

I have had two folks that pretty much do not want to use the usb stuff ever again in the last two days :-)

Wireless is great.

Gary

[Gary Frederick]

The 18th. 

Thats a few days tooo late for the talk I am doing at a local Google Developer's Hangout about App Inventor.

Any info before would be great, and make the Hangout the 18th even better.

Gary

[Gary Frederick]

I'll confuse some regardless of the name

and some get it right away.

I was going to use V1.5 for the start of a fork that did some fun things I want to do. I could call it nb.0.1 or something like that and ending up with nb1.0.

Hmmm. I'll go ask.

Gary

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>>
>>
>>
>>
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>> _______________________________________________________________________
>> Jeffrey I. Schiller
>> Information Services and Technology
>> Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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>> 617.253.0161 - Voice
>> j...@mit.edu
>> http://jis.qyv.name
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[Jos Flores]

Also note that newblocks is just a development name (only the name of
the branch); when the software is ready, it will be called something
else that we haven't thought about yet. We all like 'classic' for
current app inventor, and it's quite likely to stay that way, but the
new one is still to be named.

cheers,
José

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>> >> Jeffrey I. Schiller
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>> >> Cambridge, MA 02139-4307
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[Gary Frederick]

and we have wireless

this is so shiny

my mind boggles thinking what it will be like when it's released!!!

[Jos Flores]

Just as a heads up; there is a bug when using Firefox; the blocks
don't look right; Paul has a fix for that already, but it hasn't been
merged, so if you get any reports about that, it will be fixed soon.

cheers,
José

[Jos Flores]

guys, a short video highlighting the main differences with classic ai:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ta4qqupljcd8i5l/newblocks_intro.mp4

cheers,
José

[Gary Frederick]

there is some conversation starting in the ai4a group

  https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!forum/ai4a

That is where I will 'support' the ai4a folks when I start doing that.

I'll try to get anything worth reporting back here.

Gary

ai4a

[Gary Frederick]

A group in China tested newblocks and was happy to report that the blocks editor displayed Chinese characters correctly when editing. However, they reported that the characters were not correct when they reloaded the project.

If I understand,

they enter the Chinese for Hello World into a text block 

  世界，你好

and it displays correctly but gets clobbered when they reload the project.

I vaguely remember that the encoding is set to a default. 

vaguely???

should we report the bug (issue?)

Gary (who speaks good Texian)

[Taifun]

Jos said "Feel free to use github issues in the main repository to report bugs and features. "
could there be somehow an easier way to report bugs without having to log in to Git?
see also this thread about a "list from csv table" bug https://groups.google.com/d/msg/ai4a/_qfwNoCp9qY/pBKdUDYfA5AJ
Taifun

[Jos Flores]

Hi Taifun, thanks again for the report. If you don't want to log into
github, you can report the problems in this list and I'll make sure
they end up in the list.

thanks,
José

[scottfromscott]

Thanks for the demo, Jose
--- sfs

On Friday, May 3, 2013 10:46:09 AM UTC-5, Jos wrote:

guys, a short video highlighting the main differences with classic ai:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ta4qqupljcd8i5l/newblocks_intro.mp4

cheers,
José

On 3 May 2013 09:58, Jos Flores <josmas...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Just as a heads up; there is a bug when using Firefox; the blocks
> don't look right; Paul has a fix for that already, but it hasn't been
> merged, so if you get any reports about that, it will be fixed soon.
>
> cheers,
> José
>
>
> On 3 May 2013 09:44, Gary Frederick <g...@jsoft.com> wrote:
>> and we have wireless
>>
>> this is so shiny
>> my mind boggles thinking what it will be like when it's released!!!
>>
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[Taifun]

If you don't want to log into github, you can report the problems in this list and I'll make surethey end up in the list.

for me it's no problem, I have a login, but probably for people working with Gary's personal server V1.5.0...
Taifun

[Gary Frederick]

If people report a bug/issue and it is a problem for them because they do not have a GitHub id, I'll do the best I can to report it.

Gary

[Jos Flores]

That would be great Gary, thanks!

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[James Hwang]

This thread seems to have been dead for a month. 

I just wanted to know if work is still going on for the javascript client? 

And how far along is it? Alpha? Early beta? Late beta?

[Jos Flores]

This was an announcement, not sure why the thread would be kept alive
other than historical purposes?
You can follow progress in github, download it, and play with it. No
ETA, it's a WIP.

cheers,
José

[david duan]

I have try it.

 

I think the V1.5.0 has a lot of different.

 

May be in the future the block editor don't need to launch in java jnlp.

 

All the things can be done in the web even the emulator .

 

Therefore . I can use my android tablet to develop an app without using PC.

[Jos Flores]

Hi David, the code in the 'newblocks' branch works in the browser (the
blocks editor is not Java anymore). We know we can get the emulator
there too, but no work has been done in that sense; it's in our heads,
but we've no plans so far.
But the code in that branch does not use java web start for the BE (it
instead uses a library called Blockly to run in the browser).

cheers,
José

[david duan]

Thanks

 

   And I notice that I can develop my own blocks,like  a sns client.how .to package it to run it in the AI. to expand the function of AI

 

David.

> email to app-inventor-open-source-dev+unsub...@googlegroups.com.

[Jos Flores]

the documentation is at: http://appinventor.mit.edu/appinventor-sources/

To work with the new branch, simply use that branch instead of master.

cheers,
José

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[James Hwang]

Do you have the specific git hub link so I could run the blockly based editor?

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[Jos Flores]

https://github.com/mit-cml/appinventor-sources/tree/newblocks

cheers,
José

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