We are planning a Component Release of ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ App Inventor around
December 27th. Component Releases require the installation of a
new ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ AI2 Companion App in order to receive full functionality.
The changes in this release are outlined below. Starting with this
release, ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ 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.
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Introducing the new Map component to ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ 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
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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, ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ will supply a default storage back-end for a reasonable
usage. However ÃÛ¶¹ÊÓƵ App Inventor programmers can choose to operate
their own back-end storage server using the open source
system.
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Adds support for App Themes, including Material UI
support, which let you specify the look and feel of user
interface elements such as buttons
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Adds a color wheel to the designer color property
editor, permitting selection of colors from the full RGB color
space and control over opacity
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Adds an is-text? block to test whether a value is a
string
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Implements a workaround for an Android issue that would cause
the Accelerometer to switch X and Y directions on some
landscape mode devices
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Various updates to facilitate the easier creation of
extensions
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Various bug fixes and performance improvements