AppInventor

So I was playing around all this weekend with AppInventor from Google. It really is a neat idea, especially since I have next to nothing Java programming skill. The interface had a few little quirks (but hey, it's BETA), and it failed to sync with my droid phone a couple of times, but all-in-all I was fairly impressed.

The components are useful and broad, and range from sensor controls (accelerometer) and social buttons, to LEGO® MINDSTORM® support. The codeblocks graphical programmable system is really well done and only took a few minutes to work out what I was doing.

Part of this other project that I'm working on involves the user of a barcode scanner, so I was trying to give it a go to create a very simple droidapp that simply scans (QR or other) a barcode, allows you to enter a name for the barcode, and some freetext, and submit it online.

After hunting around the intarwebs for a while, I found shivawolf's wiki who seems to be using something called TinyWebDB to do web form (GET/POST) submits to google appengine, and from there to pastebin. Seems convoluted for something so trivial.

 

I also found a great video from the folks over at Hak5 which seem to also encounter some of the android appInventor bugs.

The reality is that it may just not support post to web yet out of the box, but given that this is such a trivial task, it should only be just a matter of time. It may have something to do with security - I'm not sure yet.

And we all have to remember it's fairly BETA. I'll keep you posted