Project 2 - New York Times Search

New York Times Search is an android app that allows a user to search for articles on web using simple filters. The app utilizes New York Times Search API.

Time spent: 30 hours spent in total

User Stories

The following required functionality is completed:

• User can search for news article by specifying a query and launching a search. Search displays a grid of image results from the New York Times Search API.
  • Used the ActionBar SearchView or custom layout as the query box
• User can click on "settings" which allows selection of advanced search options to filter results
• User can configure advanced search filters such as:
  • Begin Date (using a date picker)
  • News desk values (Arts, Fashion & Style, Sports)
  • Sort order (oldest or newest)
• Subsequent searches have any filters applied to the search results
• User can tap on any image in results to see the full text of article full-screen
• User can scroll down to see more articles. The maximum number of articles is limited by the API search.
• User can share an article link to their friends or email it to themselves

The following optional features are implemented:

• Improved the user interface and experiment with image assets and/or styling and coloring
• Replaced Filter Settings Activity with a lightweight modal overlay
• Implements robust error handling, check if internet is available, handle error cases, network failures
• Use the RecyclerView with the StaggeredGridLayoutManager to display improve the grid of image results

The following stretch features are implemented:

• For different news articles that only have text or only have images, use Heterogenous Layouts with RecyclerView
• Apply the popular Butterknife annotation library to reduce view boilerplate.
• Use Parcelable instead of Serializable using the popular Parceler library.
• Replace Picasso with Glide for more efficient image rendering.
• Leverages the data binding support module to bind data into layout templates.
• Uses retrolambda expressions to cleanup event handling blocks.
• Leverage the popular GSON library to streamline the parsing of JSON data.
• Leverage the popular Retrofit networking library to access the New York Times API.

The following additional features are implemented:

• List anything else that you can get done to improve the app functionality!

Video Walkthrough

Here's a walkthrough of implemented user stories:

Search screen, filters: http://g.recordit.co/lpe9GgE5rs.gif

Custom chrome, sharing: http://g.recordit.co/lHOJH0MraX.gif

GIF created with Recordit.

Notes

Using fragments / dialogs was a bit confusing. I had trouble with DatePicker and am not sure what the best practices are concerning the Date object type.

Open-source libraries used

• Android Async HTTP - Simple asynchronous HTTP requests with JSON parsing

License

Copyright [2016] [Lily Chen]

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.