[Android Bootcamp] Week 4 Assignment Twitter With Fragments - Code Review

[preraktrivedi]

Hello, /cc @nesquena @timothy1ee

Please review my Twitter Client redux assignment for week 4. I've added a sample apk and screenshots in the folder "sampleapk". Also updated the README.md with screenshots and features for the app. I've also included the libraries to import that are required for this project to work (PullToRefresh, PageSlidingTabStrip and support-v7-appcompat).

Hours Spent:

Spent about 25 hours over all to get all the features working and make the app as bug free as possible.

Required User stories completed:

• All user stories from previous assignment.
• User can switch between Timeline and Mention views using tabs.
• User can view their home timeline tweets.
• User can view the recent mentions of their username.
• User can scroll to bottom of either of these lists and new tweets will load ("infinite scroll")
• User can navigate to view their own profile (either using action bar menu or nav drawer)
• User can see picture, tagline, # of followers, # of following, and tweets on their profile.
• User can click on the profile image in any tweet to see another user's profile.
• User can see picture, tagline, # of followers, # of following, and tweets of clicked user.
• Profile view should include that user's timeline.

Optional User stories completed:

From Week 3:

• Improve the user interface and theme the app to feel twitter branded
• Links in tweets are clickable and viewable
• User can see a counter with total number of characters left for tweet on Compose Activity
• User can refresh tweets timeline by pulling down to refresh
• User can tap a tweet to display a "detailed" view of that tweet.
• User can select "reply" from detail view to respond to a tweet
• Stretch : User can see an embedded media (image) within tweet detail view.
• Additionally : User can see an embedded media (image) in tweet timeline as well
• Additionally : Swing in animations added for making it more beautiful.

In Week 4:

• Improve the user interface and theme the app to feel twitter branded
• User can view following / followers list through the profile.
• When a network request goes out, user sees an indeterminate progress indicator.
• User can "reply" to any tweet on their home timeline
• The user that wrote the original tweet is automatically "@" replied in compose + validations around it.
• User can click on a tweet to be taken to a "detail view" of that tweet.
• User can take favorite (and unfavorite) or reweet actions on a tweet
• Additionally: User has option to either Quote original Tweet or Retweet directly
• Additionally: User can select an image from the gallery and tweet it.
• Additionally: User can click an image using camera and tweet it.
• Additionally: User can Share the tweet using the action panel on detail tweet.
• Additionally: Animations while loading the tweets.
• Additionally: Navigation Drawer implemented for better navigation (directly to user profile or following/follower page of the authenticated user).
• Additionally: Used the ViewPager to swipe (or click) between the tabs.
• Additionally: User can take the "reply", "favorite", "retweet" action from the feed itself (on tweet item).
• Additionally: Media URL is displayed in the feed as well as the Detailed tweet.
• Additionally: Numbers on user profile are formatted like real twitter app (17.3K, 34.2M, etc)
• Additionally: Loaded the profile banner as a background for a User's profile.
• Additionally: Gave a "rounded" corner look for making the images look better.
• Addressed Issue: "Consider removing BaseModel from Tweet and User and follow this json to model approach instead which doesn't require BaseModel" as per your previous code review comment.

Devices/Emulator tested on:

-Google Nexus 5 -Samsung Galaxy S4 -Genymotion Nexus 5 image

Known Issues:

• Sometimes app crashes on the Following/Followers page because adapter does not handle redraw correctly. Didn't get much time to look into this.
• Messages tab is there in the viewpager but didn't get enough time to complete it.

Looking forward to your feedback. Let me know what you think.

Thanks, Prerak

[nesquena]

:+1: As usual, excellent submission! Definitely impressed with the amount of time you are able to put in and hope you are also pleased with the result. A few notes after checking out the code:

• Nice to see you used a drawable and/or styles to customize the view
• Nice job with including progress bar support
• Great job of using the ViewPager and Sliding Tabs Indicator!
• Good to see you properly communicated the user to the user timeline fragment from the profile activity.
• For a future exercise, challenge yourself to move even more of the logic into the base Fragment class and out of the extension timeline fragments. For example, the scroll listener could be set in the base class and then the "onLoadMore" could call an abstract method which is defined separately in the extended class. This approach could be used to move almost all the logic into the base except for certain key abstract methods.
• Consider adding local persistence of tweets by using ActiveAndroid in the Tweet and User. See the persistence guide and this other guide for more details.

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 (May 12th), we are going to have a 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.

[preraktrivedi]

Thanks a lot, Nathan, I'm definitely pleased with the result.. Most of the time was for the initial setup of Viewpager and NavDrawer but it was a really fun experience and enjoyed doing it. I will refactor the BaseClass with even more logic later on if I get time. Now the main focus is on the group project. Persistence is something still pending and hope to explore it more using Parse in the group projects.

Let me know if you have any other feedback. Thanks for all your help as well.

-Prerak

[nesquena]

Now the main focus is on the group project.

Yeah definitely makes sense to focus on the group project now at this point. You can always circle back to these assignments to incorporate feedback after the program completes. Good way to keep your learning moving forward.