Developing Your First Android App ...
On Your Smartphone!
Sketchware is a integrated development environment (IDE) inspired from the language Scratch, which allows you to develop, compile, and build an Android Application directly on your smartphone, without any help from a PC. Simply put, Sketchware is a friendly mobile application that allows you to create applications on your smartphone without having to go through any complicated setups. There are absolutely no boundaries between developers and non-programmers. Anyone can experience programming and create a working application through Sketchware.
Sketchware can range from assisting as a friendly educational tool for children to serving as a professional tool for developers to quickly start a new project. It is an excellent starting point for you to familiarize yourself with Android App development.
What does Sketchware provide?
1. Various programming examples
When you download Sketchware and open it, there are 13 examples you can complete. By completing each example, you can walk away with different programming concepts that you can apply in your own custom project. The example projects are ordered in level of difficulty, so everything you learn is cumulative.
So far, these programming concepts are provided:
Widgets, Events, Intents, URL, Activity, Random, Comparison, Date, File, Arithmetic Operations, Data Types, Character, String, Image, and More!
2. Simple Drag & Drop Interface
Sketchware’s design editor is very similar to the interface of Android Studio. You can simply drag and drop widgets and change their properties.
You are new to properties? Don’t worry! Sketchware has you covered. Spend some time on Widget Helper, and you’ll be a widget-property master in no time.
3. Scratch Inspired Block Language
Instead of programming with text on your smartphone (which really defeats the purpose of mobile IDE), you get to program with lego-like blocks in Sketchware!
Scratch is an innovative programming language created by MIT to make programming friendly for everyone. You can learn different programming logics by completing each example.
This really shortens the development time, since what would normally look like this:
public class HelloWorld {public static void main(String[] args) {
// Prints "Hello, World" to the terminal window.
System.out.println("Hello, World");
}
}
would be equivalent to this:
Here is another example. This for loop below:
int counter = 0;
for (int i = 0; i counter++;
}
would look something like this!
These blocks would save you a lot of time from typing code on your smartphone.
4. Automatically Translated Source Code
Your projects are translated to the necessary Java and XML source code in real-time. What does that mean?
- Once you feel comfortable with block languages, you can observe how your program would look in Java and XML and learn from them!
- All the projects you create are exportable and fully compatible with Android Studio, so developers can use Sketchware on-the-go!
- The application you create compiles and runs on your smartphone, so you can develop and test the application without a PC.
Here is a showcase of few applications created using Sketchware:
Whack-a-Monkey
A.I. Powered Tic-Tac-Toe
Blackjack
Fast Growing Community
You can share your finished projects, which other people can install and try. Also, if you share it publicly, others can open the project and check out the properties of different widgets and logic. Think of this sharing place as a combination of Google Play Store and GitHub. Sketchware currently has over 2,000+ apps shared that you can install and learn from.
Sketchware also has a public Slack channel where users can ask each other questions when they are stuck, or talk about anything technical :-)
What’s next?
There are so many things on our to-do list, but our next goal is to provide network blocks that will enable communication with databases like Firebase. You will be able to create chat applications and social media applications in no time!
