Android™ Application Development All-in-One For Dummies®

Chapter 1: Creating Code Quickly with App Inventor

In This Chapter

Designing a user interface

Building program logic using visual tools

Creating an Android app without typing any code

Life is a long sequence of tradeoffs. You enjoy a big gooey dessert, but the dessert isn’t healthy. You love playing in a band, but most band members don’t earn a decent living. You’re blessed with the ability to sleep 10 or 12 hours a day, but with all that lost time, you get behind writing Android Application Development All-in-One For Dummies.

And so it goes. Application development also involves tradeoffs. To use the full richness of Android’s feature set, you write Java code using Eclipse and the Android API. But if you can forgo some of Android’s fancier features, you can save time and effort using Google’s App Inventor.

App Inventor is the GUI dessert that I describe in the first paragraph. App Inventor makes Android development easy, using a drag-and-drop paradigm for both the visual interface and for an application’s logic. With App Inventor, you can’t fine-tune your work the way you can with Java code. You can’t make your application do some of the trickier things that Android programs do. ...