Hello everyone!
Today we are bringing you exciting news–in conjunction with the App Inventor Foundation, we are starting a collaboration with Kodular to integrate their modern UI, new components, and various other features into future versions of App Inventor!
Kodular was started back in July 2017 as a “fork” of the MIT App Inventor 2 project. Since then, their team has added many features to what is now known as Kodular Creator. Their team has ported features back into AI2 and some of them even worked with MIT App Inventor as a part of programs like Google Summer of Code.
The Kodular team will start by donating the Kodular Creator software and integrating portions of it into the App Inventor platform over the next year. What does this mean?
- App Inventor will be rolling out technical changes that will support different interfaces for the web editor. This will enable a huge revamp in the App Inventor User Interface, moving it to a more modern look and feel. It may not look exactly like Kodular Creator if you are familiar with their platform, but the idea is to improve the user experience and tune features according to user feedback.
- App Inventor will receive a bunch of new components and features that were available in Kodular Creator but not in App Inventor. A lot of new functionality will appear for App Inventor developers!
- Kodular will also develop a couple of new features for App Inventor, and continue to contribute on a regular basis to the development of the App Inventor platform. This will benefit the entire App Inventor development community.
You may be wondering how this process will look. Well, the Kodular team will be actively contributing to the open source repositories of the mit-cml organization. You will be able to see how the progress is going, and even provide feedback for this migration!
And the big question is: When is this going to happen? We are targeting this coming year for the beta release of this next version of the App Inventor platform. Don’t worry, the old AI2 UI will remain an option, and existing AI2 projects will be forward-compatible with the new version.
This is an initial announcement, and we will be updating the App Inventor Community with details throughout this year. We are really excited about this collaboration, as we will be building a much more modern and powerful platform for you to build all of your apps!
Cheers,
Evan W. Patton, Ph.D., Lead Software Engineer
On behalf of the MIT App Inventor team