App Inventor 2, 2nd Edition

Chapter 6. Paris Map Tour

Figure 6-0.

In this chapter, you’ll build a tour guide app for a trip to Paris. Creating a fully functioning map app might seem really complicated, but App Inventor provides two high-level components to help: the ActivityStarter, which makes it possible for you to launch another app from your app, including Google Maps, and the WebViewer, which shows any web page you want within a subpanel of your app. You’ll explore both of these components and build two different versions of a tour guide.

What You’ll Learn

This chapter introduces the following App Inventor components and concepts:

• The Activity Starter component for launching other Android apps from your app.
• The WebViewer component for showing web pages within your app.
• How to use list variables to store information for your app.
• The ListPicker component to give the user the ability to choose from a list of locations.
• How to build a URL dynamically to show different maps.

Designing the Components

Create a new project in App Inventor and call it “ParisMapTour”. The user interface for the app has an Image component with a picture of Paris, a Label component with some text, a ListPicker component that comes with an associated button, and in this first version, an ActivityStarter (non-visible) component. You can design the components using the snapshot in Figure 6-1.

Figure 6-1. The Paris Map Tour ...