Creating an EMAIL application with App Inventor

Presentation of App Inventor

App Inventor is a visual, blocks-based programming language and online platform for creating mobile apps for Android devices. It was developed by MIT’s Media Lab and is now maintained by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It allows users with little or no programming experience to create their own mobile apps by dragging and dropping visual blocks that represent programming concepts. App Inventor is also open-source, which means that anyone can access, modify, and distribute the software. It is intended to help educators and students learn programming and is widely used in classrooms and educational institutions.

Purpose of this tutorial:

It is possible to create an email application using App Inventor. The application would use the built-in ActivityStarter1 components to allow users to select an email recipient and compose an email message.

To create an email application with App Inventor, you would first need to drag and drop an EmailPicker component onto the design view of the app. This component allows users to select an email recipient from their device’s contact list. Next, you would add an ActivityStarter1 component, which provides a user interface for composing and sending an email.

You can also add additional components such as TextBoxes and Labels to the interface to allow users to enter the subject and body of the email. To make your application more interactive, you can add Buttons to trigger the email sending.

Finally, you would need to create event handlers for the various components of the application using blocks. These event handlers would specify the behavior of the components and dictate how the application will function. For example, when the user clicks the ‘Send’ button, an event handler would be triggered that would gather the information entered into the TextBoxes and pass it to the ActivityStarter1 component to send the email.

It’s worth noting that, App Inventor doesn’t have a built-in functionality to send email without a third party, such as gmail library.

In this tutorial we will create an application named ‘EMAIL’ with App Inventor which sends an email.

We propose to create the design of the application, with the following visual:

Programming the EMAIL Application:

To program the application, App Inventor proposes to use The Space Blocks which allows to create a program in the form of a block diagram. Very simple to use but requires some programming logic.

Here is the EMAIL program realized in the Blocks area of the App Inventor: