Hi AI Developers
Thanks Mr. Ethan Hon & Mr. Lasith Niro for starting the discussion about this issue which I often face as I guide my students, especially who transited from Scratch to AppInventor 2.
According to what I observed so far in creating more than twenty apps, I hope to answer some of the mentioned questions. Honestly speaking, I don't have any background in native Android App development, so I can only answer from a users' point of view
1. The ability to copy components and paste them in one screen is the most useful of all since it's currently very tedious to drag in many same components. The issue of changing the properties of many components with the same type and look can be addressed by coding the blocks, so this is not too much of an issue.
2. The duplication of related blocks doesn't seem possible because the event and action blocks can come from different components. This is object-oriented programming paradigm unlike Scratch, so it doesn't make sense to duplicate related blocks when duplicating components.
3. This question actually is quite simple to answer especially when all background images properties of various components can share the same file in appInventor. When copying a component with image property, we just need to set the backgroundImage or Picture or Image properties to the same file name which is stored in the media (or asset folder) when the file is first uploaded.
4. Without a developer background, I can't really understand why we can't copy screen. Except for storage and some hardware-related components like the camera, bluetooth, barcode-scanner, etc., I can't really think of any components that shouldn't be copied.
5. Both are desirable actually.
Besides that, I hope to add in the request for automatic renaming prompt when the component is copied.
Thanks so much for reading my comments. Any suggestion or further discussion is appreciated.