Is it just me ...?

[_JKK_]

I know absolutely no code (though a bit of HTML), and I find it to be fairly easy. So I guess coming in with no background experience is a bit of a plus?

Anyways, talking to some of my dev friends on Twitter, they have a hard time with it. Anyways. Just going to keep playing with it.

 

[CyberThreat]

Looking forward to my eventual invite. I'm a computer engineer and used to do web/UI development. But I haven't kept up on Java or a lot of the newer programming languages. I'm looking forward to seeing how App Inventor will work.... already have a few ideas for first run apps.

 

[AntiSane]

Having coded with vb6 in the past (never could get my head around .Net) I was able to dive right into AI... Love it!

 

[MelvinSF]

So.. I know some really basic VB6 and HTML/Javascript. App Inventor kind of reminded me of using Visual Basic 6.0 at school, except it didn't crash with every little thing you do. Makes things quite a bit easier, I must say. And it has the Blocks instead of the coding.

So.. I don't know. It's easy enough to me - took some tutorial reading but that's all. But maybe it's a bit too easy. I wish I could just code some things and (most importantly) do copying and pasting.

To practice I made a simple program to check if a number was even or odd. Easy, worked fine, and is completely useless.

Then I made a simple application to keep track of my grades at school. It displays a list of each subject, with behind it the grades and at the end an Edit button. At the top there's a text box with a + button next to it (used for adding new grades - will try to add a list to choose the desired subject when + is checked), that 'transforms' into the edit menu when an Edit button is pressed. All grades are stored in a database. Here is what it looks like in the block editor.

Simple enough. My main gripe (so far) is the following.

As you can see in the image each subject requires quite a few blocks to get the editing, storing and all that to work. As far as I can see there is no option to duplicate Blocks, meaning I have to spend quite some time on each subject, typing out or placing every individual block for block.

Had this been code, it would've been copy, paste, edit a few things, repeat a few times, app done.

It's easy, but I'd rather have it be like Visual Basic where you have the visual and the coding part. No idea if the actual SDK works like that. I'll check it out sometime.

With that said I think App Inventor is great, for a beta - I'm sure it'll get much better.

EDIT: Also that fairly simple grades app is 3,55 MB. That's...quite a bit.

EDIT2: Can't add in the subject list because I ran out of vertical space and you can only expand it horizontally. BLUHHHH.

 

[jesso]

You CAN copy/paste sets of blocks, with CTRL-C and CTRL-V. There's no menu option for it, but the keyboard shortcut works fine. I've used this for replicating an action, but the catch is that you do have to manually replace the variables that change. So if you have Total1, Total2, and Total3, you can't just change the 1 to 2, you have to take out the Total1 block and replace it with a Total2 block. It's a pain, but you can use copy/paste to save SOME time because you can have all the math blocks in their places already.

 

[Aspiring Developer]

For those who don't know, the block editor is a direct rip off of the LEGO™ Mindstorms programming interface.