NEW RELEASE brings sprite flinging, wifi texting, and more!

Nov 16, 2012 shay's Blog

We have great news: the new release of App Inventor is now live, and contains some exciting new functionality. Be sure to read the release notes for the entire list of updates. Here are the highlights:

• Sprites and Canvas can now respond to Fling, TouchDown, and TouchUp gestures. This offers a lot of potential for new games and interactive apps! Try out the Mini Golf tutorial that shows you how to build a fun app that takes advantage of these new gesture events. The tutorial also offers a nice example for setting up screen components dynamically so that they look great on any size screen.
• Support for Google Fusion Tables has been updated. You can now build apps that read and write to a Google Fusion Table, providing a powerful data sharing solution. See the new Pizza Party tutorial for a how-to guide on creating fusion tables and connecting to them through App Inventor.
• Texting is now enabled over wifi for phones without cell service (no SIM card)! While the traditional SMS texting over a cell phone provider still works just fine, this new capability allows you to connect to your Google Voice account so that texts can be sent and received on devices that are only connected through wifi. See How To Guide to Wifi Texting with App Inventor
• The packaging process now uses the zipalign tool so that applications can be placed in the Play store.
• There is now a Progress Bar that displays while you are building your app.
• See other updates, fixes, and notes in the v130 Release Notes.

Finally, check out the App Contest, taking place now in the App Inventor Gallery. Happy Inventing! ~Shay