infinity-james / marvelwow

An app that lists the latest Marvel comics.

Marvel Wow

This app will list all Marvel comics from today back to the beginning of time. Not only can you scroll through a seemingly infinite list of comics, but you can change the cover image for any of them, and save it to your Dropbox so that you can see that cover image every time you zoom past the comic in the list.

Choose Your Own Cover

The user can tap on any comic in the list and change the cover to any photo currrently in their photo library, or a newly taken photo.

Marvel API

Within this app is an intelligent and expansable mechanism to query Marvel's API. It is built upon the idea of queries themselves being values types to be passed around and executed within the Marvel API client.

Whilst this app only feature comics the API has been designed in such a way that any of the Marvel resources can be fetched if such functionality should need to exist in the future.

Caching

We don't want to have to load every comic from the server every time! You'll be waiting 10 seconds just to see the comic book images if we have to get them over and over again.

Introducing: the idea of caching! We cache the comic covers so that as you scroll through the feed you can see the beautiful comics (maybe with your own covers) without waiting for ever.

Dropbox

When the user wishes to provide a custom image for a comic, if they aren't already, they will be asked to log in to Dropbox where a MarvelWow folder will be created and the personalised comic book cover images will exist.

Tests

Tests are the Peter Parker of programming. They're unassuming, nerdy, and people make fun of them. When you're in trouble though, they save your butt. Without tests it would have been way harder to get my client working properly.

The only problem is, I didn't get to write enough of them! Time is a cruel mistress, and in a coding challenge there is never enough of it. I am happy with what is there, but there would ideally be more.

There should be some UI tests, but more importantly there should be tests for caching system, image fetch operations, and far more coverage for the client and queries.

CocoaPods

This app uses the framework package manager CocoaPods. Currently the only supported way to use the flashy new SwiftDropbox SDK is through CocoaPods.

Massive View Controllers! (MVC)

I like MVC, and I know that's not cool any more. However, I hate massive view controllers, and what I have here, is a massive view controller.

Ideally I would split a lot of the functionality into smaller components. This is once again a time issue, but rest assured that it is not something I make a habit of doing.

Building for the Future

I have built this app with expanasbility and maintenance in mind. It's not because I want to make this particular app better, but it is to show you in a very samll way the fact that when approaching a product I approach it always thinking about the future.

Problems

1. RAM in not managed at all. After scrolling for not very long the device's RAM is full and the app chugs. This is the biggest issue and it's just got to the point where I know you need this project now, and I have not corrected it. I hope you can look past this big flaw and see the amount of thought and planning that went behind creating this app.
2. After selecting an image for the first time you are asked to log into Dropbox. After doing so the selected image will not be saved. All subsequent images will be saved though.
3. The way that the images are fetched for the cells is not yet ideal. You can see a lot of the images on the cells changing because the naive way of determining if we have the right cell does not do the full job.