Hello everyone! I have taught school kids coding via this wonderful platform and I am very grateful for all developers , contributors and entire team of MIT app inventor to create such a huge impact and my and my student’s life.
While teaching coding the most difficult issue I phase when I have to teach students about layout or creating screen UI. It is little difficult to differentiate Vertical and horizontal arrangements boxes. I have worked on android studio and I have seen that developing UI is comparatively very easy there.
As shown in the picture , we just have to drag and drop. It will make app inventor very easy to use.
I am a beginner programmer but very passionate to solve problems. I would love if someone comes forward and guide me on the same. ps: I am currently learning gwt from http://www.gwtproject.org/doc/latest/tutorial/index.html (let me know if there are better resources available) and also setting up the development environment.
Regards,
Shivani ( majoring in computer science and engineering from India)
Could you clarify exactly what parts of this you like? Is it the absolute positioning of the components rather than the horizontal/vertical flow? Is it the constraints mechanism so that you can arrange components relative to others? Something else?
This is also how it is with virtually any other IDE I could find, including but not limited to Android Studio, code.org, tynker, and scratch. I think it would much benefit the community to allow free positioning of components.
Currently, only sprites can be freely positioned. I think we could still keep those layouts, but be able to position those layouts anywhere on the page as well. This would be useful in many applications, including but not limited to
Error Messages
Popups/Dialog boxes
Buttons on top of images, where you want one image to represent a bunch of buttons, which right now is horribly inconvenient
Game design controls or other UI
In general, I think if we had more freedom with our GUI, then this platform would be much improved. That is one of the main reasons I don’t actually develop much with this platform over others.
How do you handle different screen sizes and resolutions when using absolute positioning?
I tried Android Studio but never actually built an app. So I don’t know how you compensate for screens that are different from the one in the editor.
The web user interface is due for an update, and we’re in the preliminary stages of figuring out what it should look like. This is good to think about.
Care to comment on a feature or two that you find difficult to use?
