My Planning Process..

Before I coded anything I always like to plan out what I should do beforehand. I'll draw up a few diagrams brainstorming how I think the flow will go. Now, this is just a very rough idea of what I think the application will look like. Although, I do feel it is important that way I have a general understanding on how I should do things instead of just jumping right in.

Key Features

After reading the given instructions for this project. This was my main take aways of what needed to be done. Also, a few things that would be 'nice to haves' for this application. Again, this is just my brainstorming phase.

Application UI Rough Mock Up

Here I drew up the screens I felt the application would need. Along with a basic sketch of how I think the layout should look.

Application Flow

I am planning on following an MVC design pattern.

Development Process

After brainstorming my ideas I then had a solid direction of where I wanted to go with this application. With this in mind I jumped right into code.

Integration

• Implementation of Snapkit
• Following MVC Design Pattern
• Custom constrains for custom cells, collection views, and detailview
• Images are animated to follow the look of a Gif
• Images are Cached for optimization.
• UserDefaults are used to store minimal data for the DetailView
• All UI done programatically (No storyboards or SwiftUI)
• Functions built to handle duplicate code handling
• Giphy API Network requests

Things I Struggled With

The farther I got into the development process the more I realized it wasn't quite a walk in the park. Here are a few road blocks that slowed me down but I was still able to find a way around it.

• Once images were retrieved from the Giphy API getting them to display then animate.
• Image Caching for optimization was a little bit of a challenge due to the way I had written my code to animate these images
• Programmatic UI is not something I normally do with UIKit. So doing this project helped me learn a ton on that and snapkit! I almost now prefer to do it this way over storyboards now.

Nice to haves

Due to the time constraints I had on my project here are a few things I would have added if given the time

• Error handling done with alerts to the user. Along with a seperate enum with cases.

Bugs

• Weird glitch coming from inbetween searches and trending results. Most likely coming from a delay in loading times between network requests.

Here is the final!

Wrap Up

All in all I thought this was a really fun project. I have learned quite a bit from this. I feel even though this was a take home assesment I still wanted to polish it in a way that I would be proud of. Check out the project for yourself!