I have been looking for a while on the forum to know if there is an issue in naming an app by putting "open" in front of the name. Can I consider an app made in mit appinventor 2 being open source ?
The thing is, I am looking for contributors for a certain app which is already working at this moment, but can use some more creative input.
Giving the app and the aia file, can I call this open source, or is this confusing ? I know what the 10 rules of open source are, but I don't know if an aia file can also be considered as a source code.
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Nomenclature aside, AI2 apps are hard to collaborate on, because there are no
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tools for detecting and highlighting differences between one version of an .aia file and the next version.
You might be able to get by if you find an online collaborative editor for
doc files listing and the code through screen shots,
but applying the changes in the equivalent of a pull request would
be a tedious error prone manual process.
There's an AI2 Open Source group with volunteers seeking projects
to enhance AI2. I haven't heard any progress from that group in this regard.
Many thanks for you reaction sir,
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I'll think it over. Maybe i have to limit it to a closed group.
The demand is there. The app itself is a beekeeping software to keep track of hives and bee health. The goal is to make a noob in programming setting up his own online database of hive inspections. To achieve that, I made a website with tutorial.
At this moment, only the app is published as is, not the aia. There are a lot of considerations: every region has his own way to do their inspections, other hives, other climate,...
The idea is to make it so generic as possible and make it possible to adapt the software with textfiles or csv. The hive inspection part works, and publishes its data in a google drive spreadsheet.
But like you said, it is difficult to work with more people on the soft. Maybe I have to think on other ways of contribution: making the website, make the website communicate with the spreadsheet. But than the "open source" idea is gone, and that was what I was hoping to achieve.
Arnot, AI2 Projects CAN be built in a collaborative effort. There is a tool to do this....
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Here is the MIT Project Merger AI2 tool AI2 Project Merger Tool: combine two App Inventor projects into one
This may help several individuals by allowing them to develop different screens in a Project and then merge them. You can share your project in the MIT Gallery where users are encouraged to develop improvements to existing apps and share those.
OpenSource means different things to different people. Do not let the nomenclature stop you and like minded individuals from building a bee keeping app as part of a group. Sharing may be involve just using a common data base (like a fusion table) to share information about be migration etc. Have you seen this https://fusiontables.google.com/data?docid=1-941Px73b_XWWn3pmPHKp6WhbbSVNiEmKMadwe0#rows:id=1 and this https://support.google.com/fusiontables/answer/2527132?hl=en . Not all the collaboration has to be with the ai2 coding.
I have tried the merger, and indeed, it is a good way for collaboration, since the apphas many different features. Did not think of that, thanks ! I once needed it after a partial data loss.
I had integrated fusion tables in an older version of the app, but abandoned it because I could not find how to link the data from individual cells to another website, but with what you showed me, maybe I could give it a try again. I learned a lot more since I used it and probably I did not test it to the limit. I learned it through the famous pizza party app.
At the moment, I let the users make a form from a google spreadsheet, copy the entrypoints from the html of the form and put them in a list as text, next to the link to the form. Than upload it to the app which synchronises with the text file. After that, the app is linked to the spreadsheet. The hive inspection items are stored offline (no wifi at the beehives), and can be synced later. When there is a software update and the entry points are lost (among other things), it can be synced again with the file. It is not an ideal way, not plug and play, but it makes people understand how this appworks. Bee season is going to start in a few weeks, so I released the app the 3rd of March, joined with a google site with a tutorial, and posted the link on a beekeepers site on Facebook. I have news of a few people already installing and testing. A few things have been disconnected and "under construction" because it needs some maintenance. Those could be done by other contributors.
The Dutch version of the site : https://sites.google.com/site/openhoneybeeapp/
The English version is not entirely up to date yet. Misses illustrations. It should be finished in a few days : https://sites.google.com/site/openhoneybeeappeng/
The aia will be available too, but I have to clean up the code. Too much repeating, too little variables. Being no hero in programming I used the bulky way to make the internal interaction.
I'll look into the fusion tables again. Thanks for the info !!
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