Flixster shows the latest movies currently playing in theaters. The app utilizes the Movie Database API to display images and basic information about these movies to the user.
Time spent: 15 hours spent in total
The following required functionality is completed:
- User can scroll through current movies from the Movie Database API
- Display a nice default placeholder graphic for each image during loading
- For each movie displayed, user can see the following details:
- Title, Poster Image, Overview (Portrait mode)
- Title, Backdrop Image, Overview (Landscape mode)
- Allow user to view details of the movie including ratings within a separate activity
The following stretch features are implemented:
- Improved the user interface by experimenting with styling and coloring.
- Apply rounded corners for the poster or background images using Glide transformations
- Apply the popular View Binding annotation library to reduce boilerplate code.
- Allow video trailers to be played in full-screen using the YouTubePlayerView from the details screen.
The following additional features are implemented:
- Added formatting to show only a preview of the movie overview (6 lines of text followed by elipses) on the main activity page.
Here's a walkthrough of implemented user stories:
GIF created with LICEcap.
Learned:
- How to use intents and pass info between activities
- How to make API calls
Challenges:
- Ran into issues with the API call retrieving the Youtube video taking too long while the Java code continued to execute, causing NullPointerExceptions because the Youtube video URL variable wasn't correctly set (ended up putting everything that relied on the Youtube video URL in the same try/catch block as the API call so any commands requiring the Youtube video URL wouldn't start executing until after the Youtube video URL was correctly set)
- Android Async HTTP - Simple asynchronous HTTP requests with JSON parsing
- Glide - Image loading and caching library for Android
Copyright 2021 Emily Su
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