Project 2 - New York Times Search

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

Time spent: 25 hours spent in total

User Stories

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 article in results to view the contents in an embedded browser.
• 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
• Use Parcelable instead of Serializable using the popular Parceler library.
• Leverages the data binding support module to bind data into layout templates.
• Replace all icon drawables and other static image assets with vector drawables where appropriate.
• Replace Picasso with Glide for more efficient image rendering.
• Uses retrolambda expressions to cleanup event handling blocks.
• Leverages the popular GSON library to streamline the parsing of JSON data.
• Leverages the Retrofit networking library to access the New York Times API.
• Replace the embedded WebView with Chrome Custom Tabs using a custom action button for sharing. (2 points)

The following additional features are implemented:

• Display New York Times Top Stories on app launch
• Used ProgressDialog when waiting for API request
• Use Palette as suggested by Android Material Design guide to apply appropriate background and text color based on article's image
• For onClickListeners on RecyclerView used [ItemClickSupport] (http://www.littlerobots.nl/blog/Handle-Android-RecyclerView-Clicks/)
• Used EndlessRecyclerViewScrollListener for endless pagination (as limited by API)
• Used custom toolbar with New York Times logo

Video Walkthrough

Here's a walkthrough of implemented user stories:

Notes

When configuring application themes, setting the colour of the SearchView proved to be time consuming. Managed to find a workaround with some help. Although I am happy with the final UI, that time would have been much better spent implementing Retrofit or GSON - as I was forced to write some boilerplate code to get my task complete. Also, the Top Stories response was quite different compared to the article search response - required debugging the JSON to get both situations handled within the same Article class.

Open-source libraries used

• Android Async HTTP - Simple asynchronous HTTP requests with JSON parsing
• Glide - An image loading and caching library for Android focused on smooth scrolling.
• Parceler - Android Parcelable code generator for Google Android.

License

Copyright [2016] [Rubab Uddin]

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.