Project 4 - Instagram

Instagram is a photo sharing app using Parse as its backend.

Time spent: 18 hours spent in total

User Stories

The following required functionality is completed:

• [x] User sees app icon in home screen.
• [x] User can sign up to create a new account using Parse authentication
• [x] User can log in and log out of his or her account
• [x] The current signed in user is persisted across app restarts
• [x] User can take a photo, add a caption, and post it to "Instagram"
• [x] User can view the last 20 posts submitted to "Instagram"
• [x] User can pull to refresh the last 20 posts submitted to "Instagram"
• [x] User can tap a post to view post details, including timestamp and caption.

The following stretch features are implemented:

• [ ] Style the login page to look like the real Instagram login page.
• [x] Style the feed to look like the real Instagram feed.
• [x] User should switch between different tabs - viewing all posts (feed view), capture (camera and photo gallery view) and profile tabs (posts made) using fragments and a Bottom Navigation View.
• [ ] User can load more posts once he or she reaches the bottom of the feed using endless scrolling.
• [x] Show the username and creation time for each post
• [x] After the user submits a new post, show an indeterminate progress bar while the post is being uploaded to Parse
• User Profiles:
  • [ ] Allow the logged in user to add a profile photo
  • [ ] Display the profile photo with each post
  • [ ] Tapping on a post's username or profile photo goes to that user's profile page
  • [ ] User Profile shows posts in a grid view
• [ ] User can comment on a post and see all comments for each post in the post details screen.
• [x] User can like a post and see number of likes for each post in the post details screen.

The following additional features are implemented:

• [x] Protected/hidden text field for passwords in the login and signup activities
• [x] In the compose tab, users can delete the photo with the x icon
• [x] Bitmap orientation is detected to properly rescale the image
• [x] Users can upload photos from their gallery
  • [ ] sending that photo to the server is a little iffy, hard to convert URI to a File
• [x] Details page is a dialogfragment
• [x] Displays a shortened timestamp on the home page
  • [x] lengthened timestamp on the details fragment

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):

1. When attempting to have users upload photos from their gallery, I had a lot of trouble converting an URI to a photo File. I found multiple solutions online, but using ContentResolvers and Cursors didn't work for me.
2. I would also love to discuss the different methods of transferring data between fragments. For my app, I had an onclick in my Adapter than spawned FragmentA, which upon exit should send data to Fragment B. I attempted to use a local broadcast manager and the setTargetFragment(), but both were iffy.

Video Walkthrough

Here's a walkthrough of implemented user stories:

Credits

List an 3rd party libraries, icons, graphics, or other assets you used in your app.

• Android Async Http Client - networking library

Notes

• Uploading stored media has been a dead end for me.
• Upon testing, I had found a lot of loop holes. For example, using the back button on the home page brought me back to the login activity, rather than closing the app. This is really simple, but I hadn't thought about closing activities before. TLDR: with a chronological order to activities, the parents should be killed after prompting the child.
• A lot of similarities to Twitter. That being said, building this simplified Instagram really reinforces our understanding of what we had learned last week.

License

Copyright [2020] [?]

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.