Blockly Summit 2024 Recap

Jun 10, 2024 evan's Blog

Last week I went to Mountain View, CA to visit our friends on the Google Blockly team and to speak about the work we have been doing at App Inventor on generative AI, both in how block environments can invoke generative AI models as well as using generative AI models to code with blocks. Click the link to learn more about the event.

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Celebrating 100 Million Projects

Mar 14, 2024 evan's Blog

In February 2024, the MIT App Inventor server reached the milestone of hosting 100,000,000 projects! 🎉🎉 This milestone is a testament to the far-reaching impact of the platform, which has been translated into 20 different languages and is used in over 200 countries and regions around the world. Click 'More' to learn about App Inventor's reach.

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App Inventor at FOSDEM 2024

Feb 13, 2024 evan's Blog

I recently had the pleasure of attending FOSDEM 2024 in Brussels, Belgium last week. FOSDEM is a gathering of people contributing to free and open source software hosted at Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). While primaily focused on Europe it draws people from around the world. This year, Peter Mathijssen, an App Inventor Power User, and Bart Mathijssen, a contributor to App Inventor on GitHub, helped organize two tracks: FOSS Education Software Devroom and FOSDEM Junior.

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2023 Development Year in Review

Dec 20, 2023 evan's Blog

Hello everyone,

As we close out the year 2023, I would like to take a moment to celebrate the efforts of everyone in the App Inventor development community.

In this past year, we have open sourced our iOS implementation and made it available for the world. We also performed significant...

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An Overview of the App Inventor Sources -- Components

Apr 10, 2023 evan's Blog

Read about how the App Inventor sources are structured in this series of blog posts. This week we discuss the App Inventor components module.

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An Overview of the App Inventor Sources

Apr 3, 2023 evan's Blog

This post is the first in a series of articles on the layout and structuring of the App Inventor sources, which are available on GitHub under the Apache Software License 2.0. Each week an article will cover a different part of the system.

The App Inventor sources are broken...

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Open Sourcing of MIT App Inventor for iOS

Mar 27, 2023 evan's Blog

The App Inventor development team announces that the MIT App Inventor for iOS companion app is now open source and available on GitHub.

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HTTPS Support for App Inventor

Nov 16, 2022 evan's Blog

HTTPS Support for App Inventor

In the coming weeks, we will be rolling out HTTPS support for MIT App Inventor. This is an important update to improve the security of the many app inventors around the world, but it requires that people are running the latest software.

How will...

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Chromium 94 Issues

Sep 28, 2021 evan's Blog

Chromium 94, the core browser functionality for Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge, among others, recently introduced a new feature to protect local network devices from malicious websites. This change unfortunately affects many App Inventor users. If you use Chrome or Edge and you live test your App Inventor project using...

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MIT App Inventor for iOS on the App Store

Mar 4, 2021 evan's Blog

It is with great pleasure that the App Inventor team announces that the MIT App Inventor companion app for iOS is now generally available on the Apple App Store for iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch, and Mac. At over 66,000 lines of code, this has been a tremendous undertaking by the team.

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2020 Year in Review - App Inventor Development

Jan 12, 2021 evan's Blog

This year we had a total of 199 commits to the App Inventor open source repository, which included 88 commits from 27 contributors external to MIT. We performed thirteen releases this year including seven companion updates. This is two more contributors than last year. Welcome to everyone new this year...

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A Look at Component Usage in MIT App Inventor

Dec 19, 2020 evan's Blog

We recently analyzed App Inventor projects present in the system as of September 2019. The snapshot we used contained 42,734,420 projects (as of 2020-11-03, we now have over 54 million projects in App Inventor). This analysis focused on components to help us better understand where most effort is put into...

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File Path Updates Starting with Android 10

Aug 8, 2020 evan's Blog

Android 10 changes how applications can store data. If you use the File component you will want to read this blog entry which discusses how MIT App Inventor is adapting to this change.

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FOSDEM 2020 Trip Report

May 18, 2020 evan's Blog

The following is a guest post from MIT App Inventor Power User Peter Mathijssen.

A little report of our visit to FOSDEM 2020 in Brussel, Belgium.

FOSDEM was held in the weekend of Feb 1 and 2.

Vishwas arrived...

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Google Blockly Summit 2019 Recap

Oct 15, 2019 evan's Blog

Last week I attended the Google Blockly Summit 2019. For those of you who might not know what Blockly is, it is the JavaScript library that powers MIT App Inventor’s blocks editor (also Scratch, Microsoft MakeCode, Code.org and many more). The summit was a two day event at Google’s Mountain...

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MIT App Inventor Reaches 10 Million Users, and Other Milestones

Oct 7, 2019 evan's Blog

This year is a year of milestones for MIT App Inventor.

Back in August, we celebrated 10 years of App Inventor at the MIT App Inventor Summit. Over the weekend, MIT App Inventor saw its 10 millionth app inventor start a project. It’s great to see that over 10 million...

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MIT App Inventor for iOS version 0.9 takes off in TestFlight

Sep 25, 2019 evan's Blog

The MIT App Inventor team is pleased to announce version 0.9 of the MIT App Inventor companion for iOS. This is part of our continuting cooperation with Apple to let people create apps for iOS devices in addition to Android devices.

One design goal of MIT’s iOS effort is that...

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MIT App Inventor for iOS Enters Beta Testing

Feb 15, 2019 evan's Blog

The MIT App Inventor team is delighted to announce that weve passed a major milestone on the way to providing App Inventor for iOS.

Apple accepted MIT App Inventor for iOS into the TestFlight beta testing program this week. This lets us begin beta testing with small groups of users....

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Trip Report: Computers, Privacy & Data Protection 2019

Feb 6, 2019 evan's Blog

I recently traveled to Brussels, Belgium for the CPDP 2019 conference. Privacy and data protection are important for MIT App Inventor, not only because we support educational outreach around the world, but because we want to ensure that people who build apps with MIT App Inventor can be...

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MIT App Inventor for iOS Status Update

Sep 24, 2018 evan's Blog

We know many App Inventor users are looking forward to the iOS version of MIT App Inventor. We've been working diligently on a release, and we hope to make the iOS version publicly available in the first quarter of 2019. One feature of the release that will be especially interesting...

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App Inventor for iOS is in progress

Dec 19, 2017 evan's Blog

Hello App Inventors! We are excited to announce that we are implementing MIT App Inventor for iOS! Support for iOS has been one of the most frequent feature requests over the years, and we can't wait to see all of the great projects people will build for this new platform....

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Upcoming Feature: Maps

Sep 26, 2017 evan's Blog

Hello App Inventors! We are adding a new feature to MIT App Inventor: Maps! The Maps update will include seven new components you can leverage to build a wide range of geographically oriented applications, including finding the best places for pizza, favorite hangout spots, walking/hiking trackers, and more. Map: Renders...

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Upcoming App Inventor Features

Aug 2, 2017 evan's Blog

Hello App Inventors! Were so glad youre with us! We wanted to let you know that we are making some big changes to MIT App Inventor. First, the next release of App Inventor will require Android devices running Android system 2.1 or higher (API level 8). We need to make...

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