[Groupon iOS bootcamp] Week 1 - Submission by Chang Liu

[buy]

/cc @codepathreview

Hi, this is my week 1 assignment for Groupon iOS bootcamp.

I haven't finished all the optional features yet, will try to complete all the optional tasks if I got the chance. Submitting it for now so I won't miss the submission deadline.

Thank you!

[nickai]

👍 Nice work! The point of this homework was to explore a simple example of a full MVC application with a RESTful API. A few notes after checking out the code:

• Nice touch with adding the "last updated at time" to the refresh control.
• Great job adding in the extra details about the movie and polishing the UI!
• Nice code styling. The New York Times has a good summary of appropriate Objective-C coding conventions, you can take a quick look here.
• Nice work with the header files. You should always try to minimize the number of properties and methods in the header files and move all private properties and methods into the class extension (the @interface block in the .m file).
• In a future homework, we will cover how to implement models that can deserialize from an NSDictionary. It might be interesting to check out the Mantle project for a lightweight ORM.
• A good design is to have your custom Movie cell have a property movie. In the custom setter of movie, you can configure the various labels and images. This decouples your custom cells from the table view controllers.
• Nice work loading the images asynchronously.
• Nice work setting up the proper modes for the images so that they are not stretched.
• Nice work implementing the error message on network failure.

In general, you should challenge yourself to create visually polished applications. That's where you'll find all the rough edges of the iOS framework and earn the next level of mastery.

One of the most important part of these projects is that you add additional features and tweak the UI / UX because that will provide many more learning opportunities. I would encourage you to complete the projects each week with required stories early and then spend time adding your own UI elements and experimenting with optional extensions that will improve the user experience.

We have provided a detailed Project 1 Feedback Guide here which covers the most common points we see for this project. Read through the feedback guide point-by-point to determine other ways you could improve your submission. You should consider going back and implementing applicable feedback as well. Keep in mind that one of the most important parts of iOS development is learning the correct patterns and conventions.

If you have any particular questions about the assignment or the feedback, feel free to reply here or email us at support@codepath.com.