Project Feedback!

[codepathreview]

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

• Good layout, proper view naming, usage of sp/dp, margin and relative placement rules
• Good use of string resources for text values
• Consider adding better input validation and user feedback if values are invalid or empty
• Consider adding progress bars to your app whenever a network request goes out
• Consider including a check to see if internet is available to detect any network failures. Show an appropriate message in case of failure.
• Consider to play around with RelativeLayout. RelativeLayout is one of the most powerful responsive-first layout systems available across web and mobile platforms and provides better control in comparison to a linear layout.
• Good job using the ViewHolder pattern to improve performance of photos ListView.
• Consider adding a placeholder graphic during loading.
• Try out the YouTubePlayerView in the future.
• Consider using the [ButterKnife library annotations] (http://guides.codepath.com/android/Reducing-View-Boilerplate-with-Butterknife) for declaring handles to view objects.

One of the most important part of these projects is that you add additional features and tweak the UI / UX because that will provide many more learning opportunities. I would encourage you to complete the projects each week with required stories early and then spend time adding your own UI elements and experimenting with optional extensions that will improve the user experience.

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. please considered to add the README with features and screenshots to your project as described in the submitting assignments guide!

[codepathreview]

:+1: looks fine. A few notes after checking out the code (NY Times Search):

• Properly reused the single base method in search activity to fetch results for both initial load and the pagination
• Nice to see you added the search box to the ActionBar!
• Consider moving the search field into the ActionBar using a custom ActionBar layout or with a SearchView
• One thing to consider is rather than sending and returning all the filter values separately as keys, might have introduced a serializable model (i.e SearchFilters.java) representing all the filters which were passed back and forth between activities within the bundle.
• Consider adding the ability to share a news article. This is an important learning for this assignment even though it's optional.
• Make sure to try out creating a date picker dialog.
• Consider trying out the RecyclerView, the successor to the ListView and GridView.
• Try out the data binding support module to automatically bind data into activity layout templates.

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.

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 haitisupport@thecodepath.com.

P.S. Please see how to properly add the README with features and screenshots to your project as described in the submitting assignments guide! /cc @codepathreview