NY Times article search databse read-only android application
Time spent: 23 hours spent in total
Completed user stories:
- User can enter a search query that will display a grid of news articles using the thumbnail and headline 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 will have any filters applied to the search results.
- User can tap on any article in results to view the contents in an embedded browser.
- User can scroll down "infinitely" to continue loading more news articles. The maximum number of articles is limited by the API search.
Optional user stories:
- Robust error handling, check if internet is available, handle error cases, network failures.
- Use the ActionBar SearchView or custom layout as the query box instead of an EditText.
- Replace Filter Settings Activity with a lightweight modal overlay.
- Improve the user interface and experiment with image assets and/or styling and coloring.
- Added Staggered Grid Spacing.
- Changed the user input query search text.
- Modified RecyclerView item background color.
- Stretch: Use the RecyclerView with the StaggeredGridLayoutManager to display improve the grid of image results (see Picasso guide too).
- Stretch: For different news articles that only have text or have text with thumbnails, use Heterogenous Layouts with RecyclerView.
- Stretch: Apply the popular ButterKnife annotation library to reduce view boilerplate.
- Stretch: Use Parcelable instead of Serializable using the popular Parceler library.
- Stretch: Replace Picasso with Glide for more efficient image rendering.
- Stretch: Switch to using retrolambda expressions to cleanup event handling blocks.
The data source in this app is from The NY Times API. Special thanks to the android-async-http, Glide, Parceler, retrolambda and butterknife open-source libraries.
Walkthrough of all user stories:
GIF created with LiceCap.