plexer Posted December 4, 2013 Posted December 4, 2013 As app inventor is all web based I thought it would be great then I got reading about the phone emulator: Installing and Running the Emulator in AI2 | Explore MIT App Inventor Step 2: Turn off your firewall (don't worry, it's easy to do!) Nearly choked. Ben
Arthur Posted December 4, 2013 Posted December 4, 2013 You would have thought with all of the clever people at MIT, they would be able to create a program that isn't a piece of crud. Also, why does the emulator still use Android 2.3? No one should be designing apps for this ancient OS (especially not school kids)!
plexer Posted December 4, 2013 Author Posted December 4, 2013 It's doing my head in as they are saying they want it all installed but we use O365 and therefore to use it the students would have to create their own google accounts which worries me a bit. Ben
Arthur Posted December 4, 2013 Posted December 4, 2013 What about GenyMotion (the free version) + Android Studio?
Olliesaurus Posted December 9, 2013 Posted December 9, 2013 No idea why App Inventor is so arse about face, its causing me no end of problems. I was hoping the release of App Inventor 2 might make it a little more straight forward, turns out I couldn't have been more wrong, more ill explained CMD windows popping up all over the place.
Olliesaurus Posted December 10, 2013 Posted December 10, 2013 After 12 hours of head scratching, gpo destroying, cursing and chocolate digestives I found out that with everything fully secured App Inventor 2 works, however you need to set the Chrome gpo to bypass in order for it to connect
Mattyhew Posted January 9, 2014 Posted January 9, 2014 (edited) After 12 hours of head scratching, gpo destroying, cursing and chocolate digestives I found out that with everything fully secured App Inventor 2 works, however you need to set the Chrome gpo to bypass in order for it to connect I have also been having problems getting app inventor to work. As we use a Proxy.pac file i am unable to tell it to bypass our firewall (smoothwall) for local addresses, so instead i told it to bypass for IP 127.0.0.1 because from the CMD prompt that appears to be the port it uses. However while the emulator opens it doesn't receive the blocks data from the online app and doesn't have the AI Companion App. Do they need some special privileges on the local machine other than CMD prompt access? It runs fine on admin account. Any help would be much appreciated, this thing is driving me insane. -Matt EDIT: Here is a screenshot to help describe the issue, the countdown just loops indefinitely. I think i may have dragged the maps/phone icon onto the homepage in a fit of desperation ^^ EDIT 2: After performing the change to proxy.pac it runs on the base level local user account, which suggests a GPO is stopping it running properly. Any Suggestions would be great EDIT 3: Problem solved, needed to delete the data it had copied to the accounts profile. Working now. Edited January 9, 2014 by Mattyhew
mansin Posted January 14, 2014 Posted January 14, 2014 Hi All, Can I ask how you guys have distributed the new App Inventor 2 over the network? I need to do it in a CC4 environment. Thanks
BassTech Posted January 20, 2014 Posted January 20, 2014 Hi All, Can I ask how you guys have distributed the new App Inventor 2 over the network? I need to do it in a CC4 environment. Thanks We're in the same boat, haven't found a way to get it working on CC4 without enabling the CMD prompt :/
Squiffy101 Posted January 22, 2014 Posted January 22, 2014 @mansin &@ Lee91...I've been following the RM communities posts for setting this up. Have now come to Edugeek because of the emulator not connecting and will be trying the above to open it up for students. Instructions got me up and running with the packaging of both Chrome and app inventor. Not had to enable the CMD prompt (it runs as above screenshot, but I don't get the countdown, so working on unblocking the local host through the Chrome permissions.)
mansin Posted January 22, 2014 Posted January 22, 2014 @mansin &@ Lee91...I've been following the RM communities posts for setting this up. Have now come to Edugeek because of the emulator not connecting and will be trying the above to open it up for students. Instructions got me up and running with the packaging of both Chrome and app inventor. Not had to enable the CMD prompt (it runs as above screenshot, but I don't get the countdown, so working on unblocking the local host through the Chrome permissions.) Hi, I've tried eveything mentioned in the RM Communities as well. The Emulator won't run, keeps coming up with "Launch the aiStarter on your computer and then try again" , even though the aiStarter is running. I've checked the proxy bypass for *.local and 127.0.0.1 under the GPO for chrome but still nothing. It works fine for admin. If I look at the developer tools for Chrome it reports: "XMLHttpRequest cannot load EduGeek.net - Sorry page not found. No 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header is present on the requested resource. Origin 'http://ai2.appinventor.mit.edu' is therefore not allowed access. So something is blocking the access, just can't figure out what
mansin Posted January 27, 2014 Posted January 27, 2014 Right then, its all sorted now. First of all, I've imported the Chrome.adm template into RMMC to make things a little easier. Then simply adding the word "localhost" into the proxy bypass has solved it.
Olliesaurus Posted January 27, 2014 Posted January 27, 2014 Its a terrible piece of software really, surely there must be an easier way to get Android programming going other than App Inventor.. Glad you all got it working though!
plexer Posted January 27, 2014 Author Posted January 27, 2014 I'm hoping to get them to use appshed.com Ben
jaf Posted February 12, 2014 Posted February 12, 2014 Hi all, sorry to keep this thread going! Appinventor has been working for me on RM CC4 for the past few weeks, but it seems they have decided to update the software (yesterday) and it won't work unless you update it! There is a link here for more info Time to Update the Companion | Explore MIT App Inventor So basically I have re-ran the newest version of the setup, tried running the emulator as normal and then connecting to it, however it just says "now the companion will be updated, click OK to update" and nothing happens after that! I am stuck in an endless loop where this will not update. I have tried restarting, uninstalling and reinstalling and am running it from my admin account. Has anyone else experienced this and has any ideas for me? Thanks very much for your help.
Mattyhew Posted February 12, 2014 Posted February 12, 2014 Hi all, sorry to keep this thread going! Appinventor has been working for me on RM CC4 for the past few weeks, but it seems they have decided to update the software (yesterday) and it won't work unless you update it! There is a link here for more info Time to Update the Companion | Explore MIT App Inventor So basically I have re-ran the newest version of the setup, tried running the emulator as normal and then connecting to it, however it just says "now the companion will be updated, click OK to update" and nothing happens after that! I am stuck in an endless loop where this will not update. I have tried restarting, uninstalling and reinstalling and am running it from my admin account. Has anyone else experienced this and has any ideas for me? Thanks very much for your help. I also ran into the same problem today. Tried all the above on top of which I uninstalled the app from the emulator but that just caused it to loop waiting for the companion app to start rather than installing the newer version. Far as i can tell they just didn't bother to test whether it actually worked on the emulator. Mandatory updates on a application with little to no support and buggy releases. Joy oh Joy.
BassTech Posted February 13, 2014 Posted February 13, 2014 Hi all, sorry to keep this thread going! Appinventor has been working for me on RM CC4 for the past few weeks, but it seems they have decided to update the software (yesterday) and it won't work unless you update it! There is a link here for more info Time to Update the Companion | Explore MIT App Inventor So basically I have re-ran the newest version of the setup, tried running the emulator as normal and then connecting to it, however it just says "now the companion will be updated, click OK to update" and nothing happens after that! I am stuck in an endless loop where this will not update. I have tried restarting, uninstalling and reinstalling and am running it from my admin account. Has anyone else experienced this and has any ideas for me? Thanks very much for your help. Do you use a proxy server? I find sometimes I have to bypass the proxy when updating software from the internet, for example the google chrome installer won't connect to the internet to download it until I bypass the proxy, which is why now I download the MSI file separate.
Mattyhew Posted February 13, 2014 Posted February 13, 2014 Do you use a proxy server? I find sometimes I have to bypass the proxy when updating software from the internet, for example the google chrome installer won't connect to the internet to download it until I bypass the proxy, which is why now I download the MSI file separate. Do i take it that the companion app on your emulator updated fine when not behind a proxy?
mansin Posted February 13, 2014 Posted February 13, 2014 I can confirm that even by bypassing the proxy it has made no difference, it just stays stuck on waiting for update. Even downloading the latest version (which I can only assume is the latest version) It didn't make any difference. The olnly thing left to try is to tyr it at home tonight to see if its a connection issue. I hate this.
Mattyhew Posted February 13, 2014 Posted February 13, 2014 (edited) I can confirm that even by bypassing the proxy it has made no difference, it just stays stuck on waiting for update. Even downloading the latest version (which I can only assume is the latest version) It didn't make any difference. The olnly thing left to try is to tyr it at home tonight to see if its a connection issue. I hate this. I also tried downloading the latest version of the emulator it still comes packaged with the older version of the companion app. Even if i can get it at home, that means every update id have to re-install the emulator to each and every PC. Sigh... Also does anyone else find it somewhat obnoxious that it places itself in the startup folder without giving you the option? (unless I've missed it somehow) Edited February 13, 2014 by Mattyhew
mansin Posted February 13, 2014 Posted February 13, 2014 I also tried downloading the latest version of the emulator it still comes packaged with the older version of the companion app. Even if i can get it at home, that means every update id have to re-install the emulator to each and every PC. Sigh... Also does anyone else find it somewhat obnoxious that it places itself in the startup folder without giving you the option? (unless I've missed it somehow) You're right it does place it in the startup folder and I've not seen an option to opt out. I don't why they haven't included the latest version of the companion in the package, when they are clearly saying "its time to upgrade"
Olliesaurus Posted February 13, 2014 Posted February 13, 2014 Crappy software, no idea how it made it into the curriculum. Has anyone found a way of getting it working at all? I did some fiddling, I think the ".appinventor" folder in the root of system drive has something to do with it, I removed it to see if it would redownload the files but it appears to have just redownload the old companion files... Hoping it is just at the MIT end as opposed to something internal, really dont want to faff around with this ball ache of a software package.
jaf Posted February 13, 2014 Posted February 13, 2014 Hi, think I have this working now! Thanks for mentioning the proxy server - this is what was causing my issues. As far as I can tell it downloads a new android package (.apk) within the emulator and this isn't part of the installation files in the normal windows setup package. If it cannot connect to this, it will just sit there doing nothing as it won't work unless it's been updated. I tried telling my proxy server to allow this unauthenticated but it wasn't having any of it. What I had to do was run the emulator on a PC that bypasses our proxy server and then copy the .appinventor folder (which is normally situated in the C: drive, but I have edited the run-emulator.bat file so it gets copied to the user's home N: drive on CC4) from my test machine across to the user's profile, overwriting the old .appinventor folder. This contains an updated image of the android OS with the android package in which allows appinventor to run without asking to be updated. Not an ideal solution, but it is (mostly!) working on our PCs, luckily I only have 20 PCs and students which need it at the moment...
Olliesaurus Posted February 13, 2014 Posted February 13, 2014 Not wanting to be to cheeky... but.. Any chance you could upload your .appinventor folder somewhere? Not to worry if you would rather not!
Mattyhew Posted February 13, 2014 Posted February 13, 2014 Not wanting to be to cheeky... but.. Any chance you could upload your .appinventor folder somewhere? Not to worry if you would rather not! Would help me out as well, knowing its a working version. Don't worry if not, at least i know i can do it myself now.
Recommended Posts
Create an account or sign in to comment
You need to be a member in order to leave a comment
Create an account
Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!
Register a new accountSign in
Already have an account? Sign in here.
Sign In Now