PHOTOBOOTH
This tutorial demonstrates how to develop a Photo Booth app. You’ll build an app that
lets you take pictures, assign pictures to canvases and share pictures via email. When a
picture is taken, it will display in one of 4 canvases. When all canvases have been
assigned pictures, the next picture assignment will rotate back to first canvas.
What You’ll Build
A photo booth app allowing you to:
- Take pictures using camera
- Save pictures onto a canvas
- Display 4 pictures on 4 different canvases
- Select a canvas picture
- Share a canvas picture
- The completed app will look like the figure below:
Before starting
Make sure your computer and your phone are set up to use App Inventor. Start a new
project in the Designer window, and name it "PhotoBooth". Connect to Phone, and
make sure the phone has started the showing the App Inventor project.
Placing the Initial Components
In the Designer, click on the Layout category to view all the App Inventor layout
components. Select HorizontalArrangement layout and drop it onto designer viewer.
From the properties panel set the Width of this layout to “Fill parent”.
Next, from “User Interface” drawer, select and drop three buttons into this layout and
set their properties as follows:
Component
Rename to
Purpose
Properties
HorizontalArrangement
HorizontalArrangement1
Container for the three buttons
Width: Fill parent
Button
btnHelp
Help button
Image: [Link]
Text: none
Button
btnTakePicture
To take picture
Text: Take Picture
Width: Fill parent
Button
btnCamera
To take picture
Image: [Link]
Text: none
The completed arrangement should look like figure below:
Select and drop another HorizontalArrangment component below
HorizontalArrangement1. Select components as shown below and set their properties
as indicated:
Component
Rename to
Purpose
Properties
HorizontalArrangement
HorizontalArrangement2
Container for below components
Width: Fill parent
Canvas
Canvas1
Display camera picture
BackgroundImage: [Link]
Width: Fill parent
Label
lblFiller1
Used as filler (gap)
Text: none
Width 5
Canvas
Canvas2
Display camera picture
BackgroundImage: [Link]
Width: Fill parent
This arrangement should look like figure below:
Select and drop another HorizontalArrangment component below
HorizontalArrangement2. Select components as shown below and set their properties
as indicated:
Component
Rename to
Purpose
Properties
HorizontalArrangement
HorizontalArrangement3
Container for below components
Width: Fill parent
Canvas
Canvas3
Display camera picture
BackgroundImage: [Link]
Width: Fill parent
Label
lblFiller2
Used as filler (gap)
Text: none
Width 5
Canvas
Canvas4
Display camera picture
BackgroundImage: [Link]
Width: Fill parent
Select and drop a TextBox component below HorizontalArrangment3. Select and drop
Button below this TextBox and set their properties as below::
Component
Rename to
Purpose
Properties
TextBox
txtPictureToShare
For debug purpose only. Used to show image name
Width: Fill parent
Text: none
Hint: Picture to Share
Enabled: false
Button
btnSharePicture
To start the sharing process
Width: Fill parent
Text: Share Picture
This arrangement should look like figure below:
Finally, we will need 3 non-visible components:
Camera - Media drawer - used to take picture - Sensor
Notifier - User Interface drawer - to display informative information
Sharing -Social drawer - to share image via email
Adding Behaviors to Components
You have added Button, Canvas, TextBox and non-visible components. Its now time to
define how the components behave.
Adding the Click event to btnHelp Button component
This button is used to display help information using Notifier component. Once this
button is tapped, we will display usage-information. Since our help-text is long, we use
a “join” block (Text drawer) to join our help-text. Note that “join” has a mutator icon,
that lets you add additional slots for more input to join. For a complete explanation of
mutators, refer to documentation HERE.
Taking pictures and saving pictures into a Canvas
Users will be able to click on btnTakePicture button or the btnCamera button to start
invoking the internal camera app of the device. There are 4 canvas components on the
screen layout and they are named Canvas1 through Canvas4. Each time a picture is
taken, we will set the background of one of the canvas components onto the new
picture. The 1st picture will be set as background of Canvas1 and 2nd picture will be
set as background of Canvas2 and etc. This will continue through for all four canvas
components and will then rotate back to 1st canvas. To keep track of which canvas
should be used, we use a global variable which will be incremented for every time a
picture is taken.
Initializing global variable: From the Built-in Variables drawer, select “initialize global
name to” block. Change its name to canvasNum. Next, from Math drawer select “0”
number block and plug into socket of the new variable block:
Starting the camera: When either btnTakePicture or btnCamera buttons are clicked,
we will use their associated Click event handler to capture the event and start the
camera using [Link] block:
Saving pictures as canvas backgrounds: After a picture is taken and accepted, the
[Link] event will be triggered. In this event, the global variable
canvasNum is incremented by 1. This will allow us to rotate the canvas and save, as
background, to Canvas1 through Canvas4. When canvasNum exceeds 4, we set it back
to 1 so that we can save the picture back to Canvas1 background. To keep the code
modularized, we use a procedure that can accept an image as argument (the full image
path of the just-taken picture).
Using the Built-in Procedures drawer, select “Procedure” block and add into blocks-
editor viewer. The procedure back has a mutator. The figure below shows how to use
the mutator to construct the required procedure setPictureToCanvas.
The blocks in the procedure will need to inspect the value of our global index,
canvasNum. If this value is 1, then we set the designated image (path) to be the
background of Canvas1, if canvasNum is 2, we set it as the background of Canvas2, and
so on. For purpose of this tutorial, we will use and if-then-else block. The completed
code will look like figure below.
The setPictureToCanvas procedure will need to be invoked after a picture is taken
([Link]). In this event handler, we increment our global variable
“canvasNum” by 1.
Next, we inspect if the resulting value is greater than 4. If so, we set it back to 1.
The [Link] event handler passes a parameter called “image” which is the
full path of the picture that was just taken. Knowing this, we invoke our
“setPictureToCanvas” procedure passing this “image” parameter to it. The full block-
code for [Link] is shown in figure below:
Now, every time a picture is taken, it will display in Canvas1, then Canvas2, then
Canvas3, then Canvas4 and back to will reset back to Canvas1.
Sharing pictures: For an additional feature of the photo booth app, we will allow users
to share a picture by selecting it (via tapping on a canvas) and then tapping on the
“Share Picture” button. To capture the canvas touch events, we use [Link]
event handler. This event handler is triggered every time the canvas is touched. Canvas
also includes a block property called [Link] which returns the full
image-path of the image that is assigned to its background. We retrieve the image-
path and display it in our TextBox (txtPictureToShare):
The completed block-code for handling the touch events on all 4 canvas is shown in
figure below. Note that the code for all 4 canvases are same with exception of canvas
name:
The final functionality to implement is to share the picture via Sharing component.
When btnSharePicture is clicked, we need to check if a valid picture was selected. A
valid picture would mean that its full-path starts-with “[Link] For this, we use the
“contains” block in the Built-in Text drawer.
If the path includes “[Link] then we use “[Link]” block and
pass it the full image path and message-body.
If the path is invalid (doesn’t include “[Link] we display an alert message using
“[Link]” block.
