newyorktimessearch's Introduction

Project 2 - News Reader

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

Time spent: 22 hours spent in total

User Storiesm

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 "settings" which allows selection of advanced search options to filter results
User can configure advanced search filters such as:
- Begin Date (using a date picker)
- 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
Apply the popular Butterknife annotation library to reduce view boilerplate.
Leverage the popular GSON library to streamline the parsing of JSON data.
Replace Picasso with Glide for more efficient image rendering.
Use Parcelable instead of Serializable using the popular Parceler library.
Leverage the popular GSON library to streamline the parsing of JSON data.

The following additional features are implemented:

Video Walkthrough

Here's a walkthrough of implemented user stories:

GIF created with LiceCap.

Notes

Describe any challenges encountered while building the app.

Open-source libraries used

Android Async HTTP - Simple asynchronous HTTP requests with JSON parsing
Glide - Image loading and caching library for Android
Dynamic Height Image View - Used for image resizing
Parceler - Remove boilerplate around making model objects parcelable
RecyclerView Animators - Make RecyclerView animations easy!
Gson - streamline JSON parsing into models
Butterknife - Remove view binding boilerplate

License

Copyright 2016 Scott MacGregor

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
You may obtain a copy of the License at

    http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.

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Week 2 Project: News Reader Powered by the New York Times

My app is complete, please review. /cc @codepathreview @codepath

This was a fun project. I particularly enjoyed working with RecyclerViews / staggered grid layouts.

Interesting Notes

Leveraged the fact that enums are classes in Java to data drive processing of search filter criteria. This made it easy to add an extra sort order (relevance) and an additional news desk (like Foreign)
I like Picasso more than Glide - maybe I'm just biased by the smaller library size.
Instead of picking a random thumbnail for the staggered grid layout - I first filtered out small thumbnail images as they are too small to look good on a high res mobile device. Thought this looked better overall.
The RecyclerView Animators library is really sweet. I had fun trying out different adapter animations.

Open Questions

Use of anonymous functions. I tend to keep methods in classes flat instead of using anonymous methods inside of other methods.

Instead of doing this:

searchResultsView.addOnScrollListener(new EndlessRecyclerViewScrollListener(linearLayoutManager) {           @Override 
public void onLoadMore(int page, int totalItemsCount) {         
       loadMoreSearchResults(page);     
} });

I tend to have:

    @Override
    public void onItemClick(View view, int position) {
        *snip*
    }

    @Override
    public void onDateSet(DatePicker view, int year, int monthOfYear, int dayOfMonth) {
        *snip*
    }

    @Override
    public boolean onQueryTextSubmit(String query) {
       *snip*
    }

Is one style preferred over the other in Android? I find the flat list of methods easier to read.

Can we bind elements in onCreateOptionsMenu? Butterknife crashed for me here:

@Bind(R.id.menu_item_search) MenuItem mSearchMenuItem;

I understand why it crashed and I don't think there's a way to make it word but wanted to ask.

It was a little frustrating that in order to use the Parceler library I had to make my model's member variables public.
Using Glide I found I still needed to use a DynamicHeighImageView element to get the resizing to work right. One of the advantages of Glide is how it handles resizing. Should I have been able to optimize away my use of DynamicHeighImageView with Glide?

From the if I had more time department

Wish I had time to investigate how to use https://github.com/afollestad/material-dialogs to improve styling of the search filter fragment
Progress spinners inside the RecyclerView when loading more results
Progress spinner when searching for results

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