Project Feedback!

[codepathreview]

Hello Haibo,

Looks great, this exercise is intended in part to give you an introduction to the general rhythm of this course. The course is entirely project-based with an app being assigned each week and then due the following week. Each project builds on the last to help each engineer learn the practical elements of Android development and best practices as quickly as possible. We also do a code review for each submitted project once the program begins.

Great to see you were able to complete a large number of extensions to your app already. Your project looks great. As you can probably tell, the extension tasks available on each project are the valuable learnings since they dive deeper into common real-world Android use cases.

Be sure to take a look through our organizing your source files guide for tips on organizing your code as well.

Now that you've completed the pre-work, we'll be following up with you again shortly to outline the next steps in the admissions process.

[codepathreview]

:+1: Good work getting all required and few optional stories done. A few notes after checking out the code:

• Good layout, proper view naming, usage of sp/dp, margin and relative placement rules
• Good job on a polished UI
• Good job using the ViewHolder pattern to improve performance in ListView.
• Good job implementing heterogeneous list view
• Good job using the [ButterKnife library annotations] (http://guides.codepath.com/android/Reducing-View-Boilerplate-with-Butterknife) for declaring handles to view objects.
• Great work on implementing the YouTubePlayerView.
• Consider including a check to see if internet is available to detect any network failures. Show an appropriate message in case of failure.
• Consider implementing Recycler View instead of ListView

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 Android development is learning the correct patterns and conventions. Hopefully this first project has given you a better sense of working with RelativeLayout which is a very flexible layout system, probably one of the most powerful responsive-first layout systems available across web and mobile platforms. This assignment also gave us our first introduction to networking, working with APIs and loading remote images. The next assignment will introduce new concept such as accepting user input and navigating between activities but will also reinforce important concepts such as networking, using APIs, handling remote images.

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

P.S. Good to see you properly added the README with features and GIF to your project as described in the submitting assignments guide!

[codepathreview]

:+1: Good job getting all required and a few optional stories done. A few notes after checking out the code:

• Great work on organising source code.
• Nice to see you used action bar for searching
• Great job implementing DialogFragment for filters.
• Good job using the ConnectivityManager to check for network availability
• Properly reused the single base method in search activity to fetch results for both initial load and the pagination
• Great job using RecyclerView with StaggeredGridLayoutManager
• Good job implementing Heterogeneous layouts with Recycler View
• Good job externalizing the code for making the network call into a Client class

Also, here's a more detailed Project 2 Feedback Guide here which covers the most common issues with this submitted project. Read through the feedback guide point-by-point to determine how you could improve your submission.

Let us know if you have any other thoughts or questions about this assignment. The next assignment (Twitter Client) will be especially important since it introduces the majority of the remaining pieces necessary to build a fully functional API client with complex feeds of data and user creation. /cc @codepathreview

[codepathreview]

@billyean : can you pls update your README with all stories you have completed(optional and stretch)? Pls update here once you have done it /cc @codepathreview

[billyean]

Updated

[codepathreview]

:+1: nice work. A few notes after checking out the code:

• Good work on a clean UI
• Good to see you were able to format the timestamp cleanly
• Good to see you refreshed the timeline after composing a new tweet
• Nice touch with the character count being displayed while the user composes a tweet
• Nice to see you used a SwipeRefreshLayout library for easy timeline refreshes
• Glad to see you made the compose activity into a dialog instead
• Good job using RecyclerView instead of ListView
• Consider adding [progress bars] (http://guides.codepath.com/android/Handling-ProgressBars#actionbar-progress-bar) to your app whenever a network request goes out

Here's a detailed Project 3 Feedback Guide here which covers the most common issues with this submitted project. Read through the feedback guide point-by-point to determine how you could improve your submission.

Let us know if you have any other thoughts or questions about this assignment. Hopefully by now you feel pretty comfortable with all the major pieces to basic Android apps (Views, Controllers, ActionBar, Navigation, Models, Authentication, API Communication, Persistence, et al) and see how they all fit together. We are close now to a turning point in the course where you should be hitting a "critical mass" towards your knowledge of Android. /cc @codepathreview

[codepathreview]

:+1: Nice work. A few notes after checking out the code:

• Nicely done architecting the fragments (base class and extension classes) such that you put as much code and logic as possible in the base class and then used abstract methods to define only the specific behavior where they differ. You are on the right track but you still have some code duplication which can be moved to base fragment
• Good to see you properly communicated the user to the user timeline fragment from the profile activity.
• Nice to see you used the ViewPager to properly setup the tabs
• Good to see you played with styling and worked on making a polished UI

Here's a detailed Project 4 Feedback Guide here which covers the most common issues with this submitted project. Read through the feedback guide point-by-point to determine how you might be able to improve your submission.

This week (Week 5), we are going to cover the last major piece to the Android puzzle and that is using the hardware and SDK components such as the camera, photo gallery, location, maps, etc. After that, Week 6 and week 7 we will be covering a few important intermediate topics such as more about styling and animation as well as testing.

Following the bootcamp, we are going to have a public demo day to celebrate the progress you've all made with our next batch of Android students and multiple companies attending to see the group projects that you all have built. We are going to help however we can over the next few weeks to get the team project apps in shape for that.
/cc @codepathreview