Hi all, hope I'm posting this in the right place. I'm new here, and I want to ask a question.
MIT projects have a common trope of having community-run and maintained forks,
the likes of Turbowarp and Scratch, for example.
I'm wondering if App Inventor 2 also has such forks.
I've reviewed commercial forks(?) like Kodular and Thunkable, but they're commercial, which is an issue for me as I'm a student.
AI2 by itself, coupled with extensions, is surprisingly powerful and flexible, it's much more powerful than vanilla Scratch at least. But it's clunky for my workflow, and having its baseline build target being Android 5 makes me worry about feature support in the editor.
The future of all other forks will always be hazy? Most of the time students who wanted to make something on their own, but always using the stability of App Inventor as a base.
App Inventor's future is much better with MIT employees as developers and backed by the App Inventor Foundation. It has proven for over 16 years now that this is working. App Inventor will always be the best choice.
Maybe explain why you think it is clunky? (what ever that means )
I feel that the editor's look and feel is dated to an extent. The preview uses very old screen ratios and resolutions. I either need to make up my own "component" in the editor, or do somewhat hacky things, like making my own title bar. And the lack of control given to each component, as I needed to resort to extensions to simply make paddings around certain labels, layouts, etc.
Perhaps that's what I'm missing the most, granularity. In the app, it either needs to be programmed in by adding boilerplate code, or via an extension, which I'm not against. But the lack of a block search function, nonexistent dark mode (forced/auto dark mode does not produce pretty results), and a lack of data type documentations, are what irks me the most.
I have nothing against the developers and backers of AI2, I think they're really awesome people making projects like these feasible and accessible :), I hope this isn't interpreted as a negative remark for the app
I'd imagine forking the AppInventor repo, along with its libraries, server logic, Java bindings, and APK compiler, without prior knowledge of Android development or even what the software's code is, will not be a pleasant experience
I hope that app inventor have a feature that
use english to generate app ui even blocks
and user(app creator) only needs to debug
it potential will be infinite
is it hard?
BTW i found there is already solution called aptly
The project development is open and you can participate on GitHub:
A number of folks in this community have participated in development, and I always note GitHub contributors by their usernames in the release notes I post.
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