/SimpleTweet

SimpleTweet app for Codepath

Primary LanguageJavaMIT LicenseMIT

Project 2 - SimpleTweet

SimpleTweet is an android app that allows a user to view his Twitter timeline. The app utilizes Twitter REST API.

Time spent: 5-6 hours spent for part 1 in total

Time spent: 3-4 hours spent for part 2 in total

SimpleTweet Part 2

The following required functionality is completed:

  • User can compose and post a new tweet
  • User can click a “Compose” icon in the Action Bar on the top right
  • User can then enter a new tweet and post this to twitter
  • User is taken back to home timeline with new tweet visible in timeline
  • Newly created tweet should be manually inserted into the timeline and not rely on a full refresh
  • User can see a counter with total number of characters left for tweet on compose tweet page

The following optional features are implemented:

  • User is using "Twitter branded" colors and styles
  • User can click links in tweets launch the web browser
  • User can select "reply" from detail view to respond to a tweet
  • The "Compose" action is moved to a FloatingActionButton instead of on the AppBar
  • Compose tweet functionality is build using modal overlay
  • Use Parcelable instead of Serializable using the popular Parceler library.
  • 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.
  • When a user leaves the compose view without publishing and there is existing text, prompt to save or delete the draft. If saved, the draft should then be persisted to disk and can later be resumed from the compose view.
  • Enable your app to receive implicit intents from other apps. When a link is shared from a web browser, it should pre-fill the text and title of the web page when composing a tweet.

The following additional features are implemented:

  • Character count becomes red when exceeded limit and disables the tweet button

Video Walkthrough

Here's a walkthrough of implemented user stories:

Video Walkthrough

GIF created with LiceCap.

Notes

Personally the process was mainly smooth, the only issues were how similar certain variable names were and I mixed up very few of them.

SimpleTweet Part 1

The following required functionality is completed:

  • User can sign in to Twitter using OAuth login
  • User can view tweets from their home timeline
  • User is displayed the username, name, and body for each tweet
  • User is displayed the relative timestamp for each tweet "8m", "7h"
  • User can refresh tweets timeline by pulling down to refresh

The following optional features are implemented:

  • User can view more tweets as they scroll with infinite pagination
  • Improve the user interface and theme the app to feel "twitter branded"
  • Links in tweets are clickable and will launch the web browser
  • User can tap a tweet to display a "detailed" view of that tweet
  • User can see embedded image media within the tweet detail view
  • User can watch embedded video within the tweet
  • User can open the twitter app offline and see last loaded tweets
  • On the Twitter timeline, leverage the CoordinatorLayout to apply scrolling behavior that hides / shows the toolbar.

Video Walkthrough

Here's a walkthrough of implemented user stories:

Video Walkthrough

GIF created with LiceCap.

Notes

There were an abundant amount of issues regarding this project. First, it required you to download certain SDKs and without that knowledge one could take a lot of time figuring it out. Another issue was properly opening the SimpleTweet app, as well as refactoring classes. I had to reopen a new SimpleTweet file and close Android Studio. By doing this, Android Studio was able to recognize the class files. I also had a lot of issues with tweets being shown on my emulator. I would have to refresh a lot of times to have it show up and sometimes it would crash when refreshing. My AVDs were also missing, and I had to switch to API 27 to properly load the tweets. My emulator would bug out, presenting a fully black screen, bits of text everywhere, and applications spread out all over the emulator. Coding this project was fairly easy, but dealing with all the external issues and bugs took almost three to four hours in total. I wish I had more of that time to focus on the stretch stories as they were very interesting and compelling to me. Especially since I am an aspiring mobile app developer.

Open-source libraries used

  • Android Async HTTP - Simple asynchronous HTTP requests with JSON parsing
  • Glide - Image loading and caching library for Android

License

Copyright [2021] [Vincent Hoang]

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.