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App Inventor
book

App Inventor

by David Wolber, Hal Abelson, Ellen Spertus, Liz Looney
May 2011
Beginner to intermediate content levelBeginner to intermediate
386 pages
11h 41m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from App Inventor

Chapter 4. No Texting While Driving

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This chapter walks you through the development of No Texting While Driving, an app that autoresponds to text messages you receive while you’re driving. The app, first created with App Inventor by a beginning computer science student, is similar to a now-mass-produced app developed by State Farm Insurance. It is a prime example of how App Inventor provides access to some of the great features of the Android phone, including SMS text processing, database management, text-to-speech, and the location sensor.

In January 2010, the National Safety Council (NSC) announced the results of a study that found that at least 28 percent of all traffic accidents—close to 1.6 million crashes every year—are caused by drivers using cell phones, and at least 200,000 of those accidents occurred while drivers were texting.[1] As a result, many states have banned drivers from using cell phones altogether.

Daniel Finnegan, a student in the Fall 2010 session of the University of San Francisco App Inventor programming class, came up with a great app idea to help with the driving and texting epidemic. The app he created, which is shown in Figure 4-1, responds automatically (and hands-free) to any text with a message such as “I’m driving right now, I’ll contact you shortly.”

The No Texting While Driving app
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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781449306786Supplemental ContentErrata Page