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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 24. Communicating with Web APIs

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Mobile technology and the ubiquitous nature of the Web have changed the world we live in. You can now sit in the park and do your banking, search Amazon.com to find reviews of the book you’re reading, and check Twitter to see what people in every other park in the world are thinking about. Mobile phones have moved well past just calling and texting—now you have instant access to the world’s data, too.

You can use your phone’s browser to reach the Web, but often the small screen and limited speed of a mobile device can make this problematic. Custom apps, specially designed to pull in small chunks of particularly suitable information from the Web, can provide a more attractive alternative to the mobile browser.

In this chapter, we’ll take a broader look at apps that source information from the Web. You’ll start by creating an app that asks a website to generate a bar chart (image) of a game player’s scores for display. Then we’ll discuss how TinyWebDB can be used to access any type of data (not just images) from the Web, and we’ll provide a sample that accesses stock data from Yahoo! Finance. Finally, we’ll discuss how you can create your own web information sources that can be used by App Inventor apps.

Creativity is about remixing the world, combining (mashing) old ideas and content in interesting new ways. Eminem popularized the music mashup

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781449306786Supplemental ContentErrata Page