App Inventor for Android: Build Your Own Apps — No Experience Required!

Chapter 10: TwiTorial: A Twitter Application

In This Chapter

• Using the Twitter integration components

• Creating custom colors in App Inventor

• Using the Notifier component as a screen space-saver

Twitter has been at the cutting edge of the social media revolution ever since the company started. The micro blog enabling users to send 140-character messages to the world has become an integral part of the Internet presences of people and corporations alike.

App Inventor includes a Twitter component that has many features required to create your own complete Twitter application. The App Inventor Twitter component has its limitations, which I note as you move through this project.

The value of this project is not just in putting together a Twitter application, but also in exploring how Twitter can be integrated into other applications. You should consider social network integration in many types and categories of applications. Posting statuses or updates to a Twitter feed can be an excellent way to create brand exposure. Status updates can also be used as triggers for your applications. For instance, your App Inventor application can be monitoring a Twitter account for a certain text string as a trigger event.

Creating the TwiTorial Application

The TwiTorial application is quite complex. In terms of number of events and processes, it may be one of the most complex in this book. The instructions for TwiTorial exclusively use typeblocking to create blocks in the Blocks Editor. Because ...