New Component Release on December 27th

Dec 15, 2017 jeff's Blog

We are planning a Component Release of MIT App Inventor around December 27th. Component Releases require the installation of a new MIT AI2 Companion App in order to receive full functionality.

The changes in this release are outlined below. Starting with this release, MIT App Inventor will require Android version 2.1 or higher. We believe that there are only a very small number of devices in use today that have software older than this. Version 2.1 was released in 2009 and has been unsupported by Google for several years.

• Introducing the new Map component to MIT App Inventor. This component, built on OpenStreetMaps, works on any Android device. It includes a significant amount of new functionality including customizability of seven new map-related components, web-based editing of map content, and native support for distance calculations (e.g., Haversine). More details are available at Evans Blog Post.
• Introducing the new CloudDB component. This experimental component provides a lot of the functionality of the FirebaseDB component but without requiring a proprietary back-end database. Like Firebase, MIT will supply a default storage back-end for a reasonable usage. However MIT App Inventor programmers can choose to operate their own back-end storage server using the open source Redis system.
• Adds support for App Themes, including Material UI support, which let you specify the look and feel of user interface elements such as buttons
• Adds a color wheel to the designer color property editor, permitting selection of colors from the full RGB color space and control over opacity
• Adds an is-text? block to test whether a value is a string
• Implements a workaround for an Android issue that would cause the Accelerometer to switch X and Y directions on some landscape mode devices
• Various updates to facilitate the easier creation of extensions
• Various bug fixes and performance improvements