Building Our Apps

The hardest part of building our apps was figuring out what our apps were going to be.  It was easy to have a lot of ideas, but then when we met with Mrs. Costello, we realized we didn't have the time or App Inventor skills to build everything.  Some stuff, we could learn how to do, but other things were either too complicated or we just didn't have time.  Like, we wanted to put a login screen, but that was really complicated, and, when we thought about it, we realized we didn't actually need it. We had to focus on the core feature of our app first and make sure we could build that.

The app had to solve a problem.  It was easy to think about problems, but it was harder to have an idea for an app that could solve that problem and that we could build.  The idea had to be at least a little original.  We were going to put a music player in our app, but we realized that Pandora and iTunes have better music players, so we just linked to those.

Some things were surprisingly hard to build, like a calculator.  We had to look it up online to figure out that the + and - were variables, too.  It took a LOT of if-then statements to get the calculator working, but we realized that that's just how real apps must look when they are coded.  We never knew how much coding went into building something really simple.  That must be why early computers filled a room - they had so many if-then statements.