Flix is a movies app using the The Movie Database API.
Time spent: 14 hours spent in total
The following required functionality is complete:
- User sees an app icon on the home screen and a styled launch screen.
- User can view a list of movies currently playing in theaters from The Movie Database.
- Poster images are loaded using the UIImageView category in the AFNetworking library.
- User sees a loading state while waiting for the movies API.
- User can pull to refresh the movie list.
- User sees an error message when there's a networking error.
- User can tap a tab bar button to view a grid layout of Movie Posters using a CollectionView.
The following optional features are implemented:
- User can tap a poster in the collection view to see a detail screen of that movie
- User can search for a movie.
- All images fade in as they are loading.
- User can view the large movie poster by tapping on a cell.
- For the large poster, load the low resolution image first and then switch to the high resolution image when complete.
- Customize the selection effect of the cell.
- Customize the navigation bar.
- Customize the UI.
- User can view the app on various device sizes and orientations.
- Run your app on a real device.
The following additional features are implemented:
- List anything else that you can get done to improve the app functionality! made "Aliens" section for collection window.
Please list two areas of the assignment you'd like to discuss further with your peers during the next class (examples include better ways to implement something, how to extend your app in certain ways, etc):
- How do we know when an API call is asynchronous? I noticed that the stopAnimating method only works in a very specific part of my code.
- I'd also like to learn AutoSizing and get rid of a lot of the manual work!
Here's a walkthrough of implemented user stories:
GIF created with Kap.
Describe any challenges encountered while building the app.
One challenge was figuring out where to call the stopAnimating option for the loading Activity Indicator. I noticed that I have to call it at the end of the "else" of my fetchMovies method, and that it happens too fast if I call it outside of fetchMovies. I think this might be because fetchMovies is async, but I'm not too sure. However, startAnimating can be called outside of fetchMovies and still work. Another realted challenge was figuring out where to call startAnimating because I can't call it inside fetchMovies- pulling down the screen to refresh the Now Playing section would have 2 loading icons and look ugly. I ended up calling it right before fetchMovies in the parts where i needed to.
List an 3rd party libraries, icons, graphics, or other assets you used in your app.
- AFNetworking - networking task library
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