extending what we can do with App Inventor

[Gary]

Howdy

App Inventor is lots of fun. It has one or two shortcomings, however it has several ways you can do something if it does not do what you need.

The three I am most familiar with are

1. Activity Starter
   
2. Web components
   
3. adding components with CDK (some day)
   

https://groups.google.com/d/topic/appinventor/CLUQPBf4tMo/discussion

Activity Starter let's you start an activity, another app. You can send the activity information and even get information returned if the activity is set up to do that.

Web components let us work with the web. We can use a service on the web like a database or we can have the service do things that App Inventor currently can not do.

The CDK (Component Development Kit) is not out there... yet. Tools we can currently use, like the Java Bridge or working with the source to generate apps in other languages, give us a taste for what the CDK will do, and we should be h*app*ily building components after things go open source and folks have time to work on adding support for building components.

Sooooooooo

I have an app that adds utilities that App Inventor apps can use via Activity Starter (http://sites.jsoft.com/rm/home/fb/as/sdk/asutil in http://sites.jsoft.com/rm/home/fb/as)

Some of us working on the community are interested in adding to it. Interested?

The web components already do a lot, the community can use more info on how folks have used the various components. Interested?

The CDK is not out there yet. There is a growing community using the Java Bridge and there is at least one project that translates App Inventor source to Java. Interested?

Gary