Thank you to those that are following these updates via Facebook.

Facebook tries to automatically figure out what posts you read. But if you do not “like”, “click on”, share or comment on pages that you have “Liked”, Facebook removes those pages from your daily “newsfeed”!  And that means pages like the App Inventor 2 Tutorial gradually disappear from your FB newsfeed!

There are two ways to fix this defect in Facebook.

1.  To insure that updates are posted to your newsfeed, click on “Like” on the App Inventor 2 FB page and then click on “Get Notifications” in the drop down menu:

You can change this setting at any time by visiting the App Inventor 2 page.

Continue reading Facebook followers: Click on “Get Notifications” to stay up to date →

I have made a minor change to how posts now appear on this web site. Longer posts – especially the tutorial type posts – will show only their introductory text and images. Click on the “Continue reading–” link that appears below the post to read the full text.

By shortening the text that appears on the main page, page loads will be faster. Plus, more “short posts” can appear on the main page, making it easier to review recent content, quickly.

This change also creates a more accurate count of the posts that readers find interesting, helping to to identify the type of tutorials and content that readers want to see. Previously, full length posts, read on the main page, were not counted on the popular posts list.

Within about 2 months of starting to ramp up content on this web site, we are now seeing about 200 unique visitors each day, many arriving after searching for “how to” information using Google or other web search.

Please share these posts with your friends, using the easy social media sharing buttons that appear at the bottom of every post. Like us on Facebook, Google+ and Twitter or follow the RSS feed. Thanks!

I have added buttons after each post on the App Inventor Tutorial so you can quickly share these posts on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and so on. Please feel free to share! Your friends might like to know how they can create their own Android apps too (unless they are stuck using an iPhone … oh dear!)

An Update on the Tip Calculator App

I said there would be 3 versions and I was going to publish version 3 this evening … but we ate at a restaurant tonight and I used version 3 to calculate the tip and promptly thought of improvements!

So this evening I rewrote Version 3 (whose tutorial will appear shortly) and then created two more versions!

• Version 3 will introduce a refined user interface that eliminates user data entry errors completely.
• Version 4 introduces “procedures” to clean up the code in preparation for version 5 and introduces the concept of “refactoring” where we rewrite the code to make it better.
• Version 5 revises Version 4 to make the calculation of the tip fully automatic.

So scratch those previous references to three Tip Calculator versions – we are going for five!