Android Apps with App Inventor: The Fast and Easy Way to Build Android Apps

Chapter 12. Sensors

The integration of sensors is often new territory even for experienced programmers, as reading and processing sensor data on the computer has mostly been a task for special applications and system programmers up to now. Unlike with graphics and animation, where small mobile devices are still clearly inferior to modern computers, the opposite is true for sensors. Hardly any PC has default sensors for registering its own geoposition, current orientation, or direction of movement. Why would it need to? Most computers are intended and usable for stationary (not mobile) use, both now and in the foreseeable future. Only with the growing popularity and availability of powerful smartphones, and in particular those with the mobile ...