Week 2 Project: New York Times Article Search - Ready for Review

[tachyonlabs]

Here is my second week's assignment, please review. /cc @codepathreview @codepath

[tachyonlabs]

I just noticed one strange thing while watching my video walkthrough: While developing the app I used an Android Studio emulator (I like that it looks more like an actual phone), and on that the datepicker worked perfectly. But when creating my video walkthrough gif with LiceCap I used Genymotion because it's much faster. However, when the datepicker comes up on the Genymotion emulator in the gif, you may notice that while the datepicker header says Feb 1, on the datepicker calendar display below it it has January 1 selected. I don't know what to make of that, because on the Android Studio emulator the datepicker header and calendar always match. Just the kind of weird behavior you want to notice right after you submit your assignment for review, eek!

[tachyonlabs]

OK, when I tried it again on Genymotion, this time the datepicker didn't have that glitch, so I rerecorded and reuploaded my gif walkthrough.

[codepathreview]

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

• 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!
• Properly used spinners (with populated values) to allow users to select filters
• Properly sent and received relevant filters using a bundle to pass data between activities
• One thing to consider is rather than sending and returning all the filter values separately as keys, might have introduced a parcelable 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.
• Consider adding progress bars to your app whenever a network request goes out

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.