# Anyone interested in Google's App Inventor? - My story



## ◄ Jess ► (Apr 21, 2010)

This weekend, I tried out Google's App inventor and thought others might be interested in my experience. I noticed there were a few other discussions going on about Droids and apps, so if you want to try your hand at it...  I believe it's still invitation-only, but they are sending out invitations, it just took me around a month to get mine.

As someone with absolutely no programming experience, but lots of ideas for apps, Google's App Inventor sounded like a perfect solution - a drag and drop approach to building an app for Android phones. I applied for the program and when I finally received an invitation around a month later, I decided to build a divorce calculator, based on 21 questions backed by (albeit loose) scientific research. So this is my review of the process:

Okay, it was way harder to learn than I expected. The tutorials were somewhat useful, but didn't even BEGIN to dive into all the "blocks" that you build the program with. It took a lot of reading, research, and guessing to figure out how to do a lot of it. Two things you should know before getting too hyped up about this program: You cannot currently release programs in the app store and there is no (easy) way to create multiple pages within an app. The latter drastically limits its potential.

My biggest pet peeve with the App Inventor is its limited screen space. Why, why, why would you limit the space I can place my blocks? I had several lists that went off the screen and I had to place it together in pieces then try to finagle it into one whole piece. Secondly, it is SLOW when you get enough blocks on the screen. Also, in the browser part, it jumps you up and down the screen when you get enough components on the screen that you have to scroll up and down.

This is a great tool for someone who wants to make a very basic app, but it is not sufficient for anything more complicated, like my divorce calculator. I did manage to get it up and running, but this was my screen by the end...










That is only about 1/6 of my screen. You can minimize each "group" of blocks into a single block, but if you ever reopen the program again, it maximizes all of them. So I sure hope I have all my calculations right, because I don't know how I'd wade through that mess. Yes, this was my entire weekend's project.

So has anyone else tried it out? What was your experience/impressions?

If you want an invitation, fill out the form located here: http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/about/


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## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

Very interesting!  A little disappointing, even though I hadn't seriously considered trying this.  But of course it is early in development for it, so I'm sure it will get better.


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