Project 3 - SimpleTweets

Simple Twitter Client is an android app that allows a user to view his Twitter timeline and post a new tweet. The app utilizes Twitter REST API.

Time spent: 25 hours spent in total

User Stories

The following required functionality is completed:

• [X] User can sign in to Twitter using OAuth login
• [X] User can view tweets from their home timeline
  • [X] User is displayed the username, name, and body for each tweet
  • [X] User is displayed the relative timestamp for each tweet "8m", "7h"
  • [X] User can view more tweets as they scroll with infinite pagination. Number of tweets is unlimited. However there are Twitter Api Rate Limits in place.
• [X] User can compose and post a new tweet
  • [X] User can click a “Compose” icon in the Action Bar on the top right
  • [X] User can then enter a new tweet and post this to twitter
  • [X] User is taken back to home timeline with new tweet visible in timeline

The following optional features are implemented:

• [X] User can see a counter with total number of characters left for tweet on compose tweet page
• [X] User can click a link within a tweet body on tweet details view. The click will launch the web browser with relevant page opened.
• [X] User can pull down to refresh tweets timeline
• [X] User can open the twitter app offline and see last loaded tweets. Persisted in SQLite tweets are refreshed on every application launch. While "live data" is displayed when app can get it from Twitter API, it is also saved for use in offline mode.
• [X] User can tap a tweet to open a detailed tweet view
• [X] User can select "reply" from detail view to respond to a tweet
• [X] Improve the user interface and theme the app to feel "twitter branded"

The following bonus features are implemented:

• [X] User can see embedded image media within the tweet detail view
• [X] User can watch embedded video within the tweet
• [X] Compose tweet functionality is build using modal overlay
• [X] Use Parcelable instead of Serializable using the popular Parceler library.
• [X] Apply the popular Butterknife annotation library to reduce view boilerplate.
• [X] Leverage the popular GSON library to streamline the parsing of JSON data.
• [X] Leverage RecyclerView as a replacement for the ListView and ArrayAdapter for all lists of tweets.
• [X] Move the "Compose" action to a FloatingActionButton instead of on the AppBar.
• [X] Replace Picasso with Glide for more efficient image rendering.

The following additional features are implemented:

• [X] Used ViewHolder Patter

Video Walkthrough

Here's a walkthrough of implemented user stories:

GIF created with LiceCap.

Notes

• GSON Library implementation is tedious and overwhelming for API's which returns large data set
• Video integrations are not smooth. After integration; video display is not smooth
• UI Styling is also little hard with different layouts

Open-source libraries used

• Android Async HTTP - Simple asynchronous HTTP requests with JSON parsing
• Picasso - Image loading and caching library for Android
• [Glide] (http://inthecheesefactory.com/blog/get-to-know-glide-recommended-by-google/en) - Image loading and caching library for Android
• Butterknife annotation library - View "Injection" library for Android
• GSON library - Streamline the parsing of JSON data
• ActiveAndroid - Simple ORM for persisting a local SQLite database on the Android device
• Android-ScalableVideoView - Scalable Video view
• Parceler - Serialize Java Objects between Contexts

License

Copyright [2016] [Shyam Rokde]

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.