We plan to release a new version of MIT App Inventor on Thursday. This version, nb175, will include a new Companion (version 2.51). The current companion (version 2.50) will continue to work, but you will require the new version to use the new functionality described below.
We are planning a Component Release of MIT App Inventor around December 27th. Component Releases require the installation of a new MIT AI2 Companion App in order to receive full functionality.
We will be deploying a new release of MIT App Inventor on Thursday
afternoon on February 18th (2016-02-19 02:00:00 UTC). The details are
in the Release Notes (DRAFT).
MIT App Inventor is designed to be used by an individual using only one computer at a time. If you open a project on one computer and then open the same project on a second computer (or even in a second browser window) you can cause your project to become corrupted.
Back at the beginning of January I wrote to explain how we are going to reduce the number of times you have to update your MIT App Inventor software installation by distributing a Companion App with the ability to update itself.
On February 11 we’ll implement this auto-update mechanism in MIT App Inventor 2, so that your Companion App will be brought up to the newest version. To take advantage of this new feature, you might have to manually update Companion one final time.
There is yet another version of the Mac and Windows Setup! Why so many versions? And what we are doing about it?!
The MIT AI2 Companion is a copy of every component of App Inventor. When we update the App Inventor components, we need to distribute a new Companion which contains the updated components. The Android Emulator, which we distribute with the Setup Tools, has a copy of the MIT AI2 Companion embedded in it. So when we distribute a new Companion, we need to distribute a new version of the Setup Tools.
If you are running Java 6 on a Macintosh, you should run Apple's latest software update 12 released February 1st. If you have been running Java 7 you may get a notice when opening the Blocks Editor that asks you to update Java. You must run this update to use App Inventor.
