Likhwa Tech

In addition to solving some of the world's common problems I'm sure it would also be nice to make some money from your Sketchware Apps. The following article will give you some tips to help you make money with your apps. I wont go into the technical aspect of creating ads but I will give an overview of factors that I believe will determine your success or failure. 1. Do your research I've been doing this for a while so I hear new ideas virtually everyday... I've also had a lot of new ideas myself, but just because your idea excites you doesnt mean  it will be great. It has to excite the next person as well(no, not your mom or sister). The only way you can find out of it's a good idea is by testing it and that means creating a minimum viable product and then getting Beta testers. Avoid getting caught up in your own bubble....  2. Your app has to work Your app has to do what you claim it does and it should do it well. This is mandatory and it simplifies the work of ac

Today, I will be sharing some useful tips that I wish I knew when I started using Sketchware. These tips will help you work faster and simplify the way you do tasks. COPYING A LAYOUT You've built a beautiful layout or someone shared a project with you and you want to replicate the layout on another activity. Instead of having to recreate it, you can highlight the layout that you want to copy and then click the save button. After you save a layout it will appear in your views just under the shared views icon You can then drag it from the list and use it again on another activity. SAVE BLOCKS TO COLLECTIONS After creating a complex or long sequence of blocks, instead of having to recreate them, you can copy them to your collections. These will be available in your collections and you can easily access and reuse them from there. NB- You still have to recreate variables and other components that you want to reuse on the new activity. These will not be imported unless they already exist

I'm sure you've noticed how most apps display a logo when you open them. That is known as a loading screen. It is a great opportunity for branding purposes and it's an ego boost just to watch your logo. This tutorial will show you how to create a loading screen. How it works When we open our main activity, we will use an intent to automatically open our loading screen. Once on our loading screen, we will then use a timer to automatically end the loading activity after 2000 milliseconds. You can adjust this to your desired duration in milliseconds. We will then finish the activity. This removes it from our activity stack and returns us to the previous screen. Start by creating a new project. If you're not sure how to create a new Sketchware project then click here. I have created an app and the MainActivity is where I have my main menu.  The first step is to navigate to the onCreate event of my MainActivity and place an intent. If my user has to login, I can use the logi

As your username grows, you will probably want to add translations to your app. These will enhance the user experience for users in other countries, and locations who speak another native language. This tutorial will show you how to implement translations in Sketchware. I have create a settings page and added a spinner where the user can choose their preferred language. My settings page looks like this: Step 2. In onCreate I have added a list string with the languages that I want my app to be translated to. So my logic in onCreate will look like this: Step 3. Once the user chooses a language, they can click the Save button to confirm their language selection. So I created a shared preferences component with the name "settings" and file name "settings." I will save the language selection using the key "language." This is where the language information will be saved. My logic on the Save button's onClicked event will look like this: Step 4. I created a m

This tutorial covers how to get the total value of items at a specific key of a listmap. Prerequisites: A listmap with logic already set up. This tutorial assumes you already have a listmap and want to calculate the total. If you do not know how to set up a listmap then you should check out my tutorial on how to create your own record keeping app . Add a linear Add a textview to the linear. This will display our total. Go to the events tab Add a more block as shown below Name your block and then click add Open the more block In your more block, create 2 number variables "n" and "total".  Click 'add variable' and name your variables 'total' and 'n' NB- If you already have a variable named n or total, then give it another name. In my case I called my total variable, "total1" Then place your blocks to get the total like this: In my example, I get the total and display it as a string in the decimal format 0.00 I also use a 'shared p

A simple menu showing the Alpha property at work The alpha property is used to make or add translucency to a widget or layout. This feature is particularly useful in making your app even more beautiful since it allows you to add layers to your interface. Every widget and layout comes with a default Alpha value of 1.0 and this is not translucent. You can reduce the translucency to a suitable value. The above layout was created by adding a linear and setting an image as background resource. I then placed 2 linears and changed the background colors to purple and black respectively. After that,  I set the Alpha value of those 2 linears to 0.7 to make the image in the background of the main linear visible. The example below is a simple screen which uses the Alpha property to together with the background image to create a login page. The first linear has a picture set as its background resource and then the second linear has its background colour set to black and Alpha value reduced to 0.7 Y

This tutorial will give you some tips to help you build a nice, professional looking interface in Sketchware. If you are still a new user, you might want to read this article on how to start building your interface in Sketchware. We will cover: 1. Corner radii with gradient 2. Rounded corners 3. Adding shadow to a view 4. Add gradient and rounded corners CORNER RADII WITH GRADIENT IN SKETCHWARE Start by adding a linear to your layout. I have given my linear a width of 150 and a height of 150.  I have added an add source directly block on my onCreate and I have typed in the following code: android.graphics.drawable.GradientDrawable gd = new android.graphics.drawable.GradientDrawable(android.graphics.drawable.GradientDrawable.Orientation.RIGHT_LEFT,new int[]{ 0xFF6B32E1,//Top Color 0xFFA130E2 //Bottom Color }); gd.setCornerRadii(new float[] {0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 390, 390 }); linear4.setBackgroundDrawable(gd); ROUNDED CORNERS If you want to add rounded corners to a widget like I have done in

How to easily create background notifications in Sketchware(original) One of the keys to building a successful app is to find mechanisms that will keep your users engaged. You can do this by using background notifications. This tutorial will show you how to do that in Sketchware. We will cover: 1. How to create notifications in Sketchware 2. How to show these notifications even when the app is closed.

The List and listview One of the most powerful tools in building apps is the listview. This is the key feature used to create chat applications, accounting apps, notes apps, directories and so much more. There are three types of lists: 1. Number list 2. String list 3. Map list 1. Number List A number list is one that contains only numerical values. e.g. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. This type of list would be ideal if I'm building a datepicker or a timer app which stores mainly numbers 2. String list A string list can contain numbers, letters and other special characters. e.g. a list of country names like Australia, Brazil, Canada and so on. This can be used together with a spinner to let the user choose their location. If you're creating a simple app that collects user names and nothing else then this might do. 3. Map List A map list is one that contains numerous keys with different data at each position e.g. Date, Name, Age, Sex. This coupled with firebase can create a group chat or one to

At some point you might want your users to be able to save or store data for later use. This might be when a game is paused or when recording information.  There are two ways to save data in an app. One is using the Shared preferences component which saves data in the user's device storage or using online storage such as Firebase database or Firebase storage 1. Shared Preferences This saves data on the user's device or phone memory and thus it is also referred to as 'saving to local storage.' This means that when the User deletes the App, then that data is also lost. 2. Firebase Database/Storage This saves the User data on a central database managed by Google but under your control. Just like your email. This data remains in your database when a user deletes the App. It is also the platform from which messages are stored and received when chatting.  Tutorial For today's tutorial we will save data to Shared Preferences Step 1 Add an *edittext* widget to your app.  Ch

Now that you've had a look at some of the user interface widgets and layouts, the next step is for us to add functionality to the various widgets. You now want an action to happen during a certain *EVENT* such as navigate to another screen. This will be done using components.  Sketchware comes with numerous *COMPONENTS* and you can see some of these in the attached screen. These *COMPONENTS* are used within events. For example, when the User opens the app for the first time( *onCreate* ) you might want to automatically display a welcome message. This is done by creating a *dialogue* component.  Each of these components behaves differently but they are controlled using blocks. This is the programming aspect of building your app. Depending on whatever *LOGIC* you can come up with, I guarantee you can build amazing apps. In our logic section, let's go to the components section and create a new dialog component.  I gave my component the name "welcome" and placed it on onA

As explained in the previous tutorial, the number variables are useful for making calculations. In today's example we will create a simple app that adds two numbers. This will cover: 1. How to convert a string to a number variable 2. How to add 2 numbers and the logic behind it I will start by creating a new project. In my layout, I have 2 edittexts where a user enters a number and then a Textview to display the answer. It will therefore look like this: Fo us to do a calculation, we will need to start by converting the contents of our edittext to a number variable. Once it has been converted we can then use the green Operator blocks to calculate. So I will place the logic onTextChanged. The image below shows how to add an onTextChanged event Once I've added my event, I will then create a number variable with the name "firstnumber" - you can give it any name that makes sense to you e.g. dailysales, subject1, score etc. Once you've created the variable, place the