This is the image that you’re greeted with when you open my app, centered around cats. It is quite a simple thing, but I think that I was able to meet most of what I wanted to achieve with it.
I wanted to create an interactive environment where you could just see different cat breeds I liked and why. App Inventor is a fairly easy app; there really isn’t any difficulty in uploading content or anything. It’s made for kids, and it shows.
Like with everything, though, I did feel limited. The fonts were hideous, and I had only like five options. It also does not like it when you want to write anything more than a short caption. I had to go to Google Docs to create short descriptions of 50 to 100 words for each breed.
Then, there is no formatting tool, so I have to go over each slide, individually, to fix any slight issues I might have had. I was constantly changing the different background colors, and it was a nightmare. By the end, I just gave up and did one per slide that went with the cat. I might be lazy, but never arbitrary.
Moving on to the coding aspect, everything I wanted to do was simple. The coding was just limited to some simple animations and moving between pages, and I am grateful. There were more “complicated” (this word is relative because of my lack of coding knowledge) aspects of it, but I just didn’t know what to do with them.
When You're Confused
When I think about it, I’m like: What could I have done to make this more interesting? How could I have made my app more fun? Besides the fact that you have to be interesting and fun to make something interesting and fun (both of which I’m not). I felt like I really didn’t have a conception of what was possible or what I could do.
My first idea was to make a simple game about cats. It would be something like Cat Wars, where you would select a cat and have it fight against a randomly generated one. That did not go too far…
It’s like if I gave you some ingredients and said, “Make alfajores.” More than likely, you don’t know what that is. You might not even know how to bake (now you know it’s a sweet), and you probably have never had dulce de leche or can find it easily in Tally. That right there was me.
Honestly, I’m proud of what I did, even though it’s rudimentary, it has a charm to it. It doesn’t look bad, and that’s really what matters. It doesn’t have to be complex; it just has to work.
I would have to say that the most annoying thing was managing the size of each text box. You had to mess with the vertical and horizontal height, and they would always do the exact thing that you didn’t want them to do.
I was constantly fighting against them, and it got to be mildly annoying. Like what I said with making a game, it’s not complex enough to do what you want, but it is still complex enough to allow you to do enough. Yeah, it was made for 10-year-olds, and that is not a point for complaining. If it were actual coding, from me, you would get a nice white screen.
I learned that if you really want something, you just have to do it yourself; there are no shortcuts. If you want to do something without having the skill set, then you’ve got to pay. Sneaking in some economics, you don’t want to be a jack of all trades; you need to be a master and specialize in what you’re good at to maximize marginal benefit.
That doesn’t mean that I don’t find value in coding. It is just new, and the road to learning it will be, oh, so cumbersome. I can already sense it.
