kfullen / flix

Project 2 - Flix

Flix is a movies app using the The Movie Database API.

Time spent: 15-20 hours spent in total

User Stories

The following required functionality is complete:

• User can view a list of movies currently playing in theaters from The Movie Database.
• Poster images are loaded using the UIImageView category in the AFNetworking library.
• User sees a loading state while waiting for the movies API.
• User can pull to refresh the movie list.

The following optional features are implemented:

• User sees an error message when there's a networking error.
• Movies are displayed using a CollectionView instead of a TableView.
• User can search for a movie.
• All images fade in as they are loading.
• User can view the large movie poster by tapping on a cell.
• For the large poster, load the low resolution image first and then switch to the high resolution image when complete.
• Customize the selection effect of the cell.
• Customize the navigation bar.
• Customize the UI.

The following additional features are implemented:

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

Please list two areas of the assignment you'd like to discuss further with your peers during the next class (examples include better ways to implement something, how to extend your app in certain ways, etc):

1. Ways to reduce redundant sections of code
2. Implementing the trailer functionality

Video Walkthrough

Here's a walkthrough of implemented user stories:

http://g.recordit.co/9Teoyv5fyK.gif

GIF created with RecordIt

Notes

Describe any challenges encountered while building the app.

• Figuring out where certain bits of code should be placed as the project becomes larger and more complex
• Keeping track of all of the interconnections between files

Credits

List an 3rd party libraries, icons, graphics, or other assets you used in your app.

• AFNetworking - networking task library

License

Copyright [yyyy] [name of copyright owner]

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.

flix's Issues

Project Feedback!

👍 Nice work! The purpose of this project was to continue learning Objective-C and the Cocoa Touch (iOS) framework. You should be comfortable creating table views (one of the most common views in iOS) and working with array of dictionaries created from JSON (in this case from the Movies Database API).

A key part of these projects is that you work to polish the visuals and the small UI / UX touches. Developing your design sense is an important part of being a mobile engineer. You'll find that perfecting the UI / UX will often lead to interesting technical challenges as well because the libraries may not behave exactly as you want them to, so you'll have to learn how to achieve the effect that you want. A few other things to note:

• Did you use 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).
• Did you minimize the number of public methods and properties in your classes? You should always try to minimize the number of properties and methods that are in the header files. Only expose what you have to, e.g., properties and methods that must be accessed by other classes.
• Did you properly 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. The most common combination is to use Aspect Fill combined with clipping subviews.