Project Feedback!

[codepathreview]

Looks good, 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 iOS development and best practices as quickly as possible. We also do a code review for each submitted project once the program begins.

[codepathreview]

:+1: great job! The point of this homework was to explore a simple example of a full MVC application with a RESTful API. Excellent job tackling many of the optional features. The more optional features you tackle, the more of the framework you'll be able to explore by the end of the class.

Here's a checklist of things that I'm looking for in this project.

• Code styling. Check out the Ray Wenderlich Swift Style Guide and the Github Swift Style Guide
• Using groups to organize your source files. It's pretty common to organize your source files into Groups, especially for larger projects. You can organize by type of class (i.e. View Controllers, Views, etc) or for larger apps by functionality (i.e. Home Screen, Search Screen, etc).
• Minimize the number of public functions and properties in your classes. You should always try to minimize the number of properties and functions that are public or internal. If unspecified, the scope is internal.
• Set the Content Mode for your ImageViews. By default the UIContentMode will stretch the image to match the dimensions of the image view, which is probably not what you want. You usually want it set to Aspect Fill with clip subviews.
• Avoid naming collisions inside of your UITableViewCell. When creating a custom cell make sure to never name a property imageView, titleLabel, or subtitleLabel. Those are already defined by UITableViewCell and using them in your custom cell will cause subtle things to happen such as image views not loading until you click on the cell.
• Model classes. Creating a Movie model class will allow you move the deserialization code out of the view controller. You should also create a movie property in your custom cell and use a property observer to update the cell's subviews. There are certain libraries like SwiftyJSON that remove the need for a lot of boilerplate code and make it easier to convert from JSON to your model objects. Other popular repositories include Argo, ObjectMapper, and Decodable
• Next week, we'll cover how to use Auto Layout constraints to implement dynamic height rows and adjust to synopsis of different length.

Here are some other things I noted while reviewing your assignment

• Great job customizing the nav and search bars — looks awesome!
  • Try: spending some more time wrangling the framework. It would be nice to have the table view background be the same color as the cells
• Try: using proper grouping to keep all of the application files organized properly. The movies view controller was outside of the other code files. While not critical for this assignment, it is important when working on larger teams!
• Good job loading the placeholder image
  • Try: extracting the fade in code and placeholder loading code into an extension method of UIImageView to keep the view controllers clean
• Instead of using a dictionary for the movies, try creating a Movie class to hold all of the data. You get the added type safety and do not have to scatter string literals and casts all over the code. You are also able to encapsulate some of the logic belonging to a movie (eg. creating the correct poster URLs)
• Try: extracting the methods that hit the API so that they can be reused more easily
• Try: moving the customization of the view to the table view cell subclasses so that you don’t have to do as much work inside of the view controller
• Good job implementing the networking indicator

In general, you should challenge yourself to create visually polished applications. That's where you'll find all the rough edges of the iOS framework and earn the next level of mastery. /cc @codepathreview