yoavgray / nytimes-codepath-2

Project 2 - NYTArticleFinder

NYTArticleFinder is an android app that allows a user to search for articles on web using simple filters. The app utilizes New York Times Search API.

Time spent: 26 hours spent in total

User Stories

The following required functionality is completed:

• User can search for news article by specifying a query and launching a search. Search displays a grid of image results from the New York Times Search API.
• User can click on a FloatingActionButton which allows selection of advanced search options to filter results
• User can configure advanced search filters such as:
  • Begin Date (using a date picker)
  • End Date !!!
  • News desk values (Arts, Fashion & Style, Sports)
  • Sort order (oldest or newest)
• Subsequent searches have any filters applied to the search results
• User can tap on any image in results to see the full text of article full-screen
• User can scroll down to see more articles. The maximum number of articles is limited by the API search.

The following optional features are implemented:

• Implements robust error handling, check if internet is available, handle error cases, network failures
• Used the ActionBar SearchView or custom layout as the query box instead of an EditText
• User can share an article link to their friends or email it to themselves
• Replaced Filter Settings Activity with a lightweight modal overlay
• Improved the user interface and experiment with image assets and/or styling and coloring

The following bonus features are implemented:

• Use the RecyclerView with the StaggeredGridLayoutManager to display improve the grid of image results
• For different news articles that only have text or only have images, use Heterogenous Layouts with RecyclerView
• Use Parcelable instead of Serializable using the popular Parceler library.
• Leverages the data binding support module to bind data into layout templates.
• Replace all icon drawables and other static image assets with vector drawables where appropriate.
• Replace Picasso with Glide for more efficient image rendering.
• Uses retrolambda expressions to cleanup event handling blocks.
• Leverages the popular GSON library to streamline the parsing of JSON data.
• Leverages the Retrofit networking library to access the New York Times API.
• Replace the embedded WebView with Chrome Custom Tabs using a custom action button for sharing. (2 points)

The following additional features are implemented:

• Add another horizontal RecyclerView with News desk categories
• Add Calligraphy to use cool fonts!

Video Walkthrough

Here's a walkthrough of implemented user stories:

GIF created with LiceCap.

Notes

I had less time than in the first project but I did most of the things. I encountered some problems with Retrofit so I hope to implement it in the next project. I was super excited to learn about the Views data binding and i'm definitely going to use that.

Open-source libraries used

• Parceler - Android Parcelables made easy through code generation
• Calligraphy - Use cool fonts very easily!
• OkHttp - An HTTP & HTTP/2 client for Android and Java applications
• Glide - Image loading and caching library for Android
• ButterKnife - View Binding for android
• Gson - Java library that can be used to convert Java Objects into their JSON representation
• Wasabeef - Tweak images downloaded from Glide!