App Inventor version nb181 (December 19th, 2019)

MIT App Inventor is constantly upgrading, including minor improvements and bug fixes. I'd like to talk about two things that I've paid attention to in this release of "nb181". They are improved XML decoding and the addition of pressure sensor component.

XMLDecode Now Handles CDATA Sections
In XML, you may want to use markup symbols in regular strings. For example as in the following figure. However, XMLTextDecode in the XML Web component did not handle the "![CDATA [...]]" sections well. Therefore, these sections had to be removed as follows:

This issue was discussed by the community around 2015. As a countermeasure, Taifun [1] presented the above method. However, this version of App Inventor seems to have solved this problem.

Addition of Barometer
I developed several apps that use the barometric sensor built into the Android Phone and published them at the MIT App Inventor Summit 2014 [2]. At that time, App Inventor could not use the barometric pressure sensor, so I created a small Java program to get the barometric pressure value and called it with ActivityStarter.

An example of an Android application using a barometer [2]

Since then, I have used barometric pressure components [3] installed in AppyBuilder and Taifun's Extension [4]. However, with this version upgrade of App Inventor, you can use barometric pressure sensor as one of the standard sensors without using them. Great!

References

[1] Taifun's post on CDATA
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mitappinventortest/TZO5InFSIkU
[2] Fujio Yamamoto, “Rapid Prototyping Using App Inventor in Information and Computer Sciences Course”, Proc. of the MIT App Inventor Summit 2014, 3 pages, Cambridge USA, July 2014.
[3] PressureSensor by Hossein's Appy Builder
http://appybuilder.com (AppyBuilder is being integrated with Kodular)
[4] Taifun's Barometer Sensor Extension
https://puravidaapps.com/barometer.php