Recently, became Udacity project reviewer where I would be reviewing Android Nanodegree Basics Course student project works.so, Continuing exciting the Nanodegree journey with Udacity, the second project was building popular movies application.This was challenging one to build because we need to use the same source-code to build for the next upcoming project which concentrates on extending the user interface for tablets too.so,let's see what we learnt and implemented as project.
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| P1 Popular Movies App - Udacity Android Nanodegree Recap and Review |
Project Repo : link
Scope of this project :
To understand & implement themoviedb.org api and performing networking operations in AsyncTask (background thread) and updating UI(main) thread.
yes we've learnt in our concepts of operating system namely Paging concept.when the listview gets initialise it measures the height of the layout and decides the number of list to be shown in the view and loads the particular count of data from adapter to the view, it also prefetches few data set front and back to manage stagger less scrolling.it uses the same object and recycles for other data set and inflates the view into the Listview.Note that Recyclerview is enhanced version of Listview.
difference between Listview and Recyclerview - Stackoverflow Link
Developer Reference : link
for bugs,hugs and comments just comment below or mail me.Chat with me in G+/Facebook for help and improved version of this article.Share is care.
Process and Concepts :
The ultimate aim of this project is- Connect mobile app with Cloud
- Performing Network operations in background thread
- loading images from Internet and deciding optimised sizes for corresponding views.
- Clear understanding with RecyclerView or ListView working
- Intents to navigate between activities
- Concentrating more on SavedInstance State Bundle
Concepts demystified :
We'll look into the above mentioned concepts with few lines and reference links which i've used to learn while building the App.
Connect mobile app with Cloud :
The first thing about android app it should fetch data from cloud or API or server with updated details and making sure it works offline by caching it in Sqlite database or sharedpreferences.This Google I/O session is the best session ever made to understand the networking operations coding approach while you build your app for the next billion users coming over online.
Developer reference : link
Loading Images from internet :
One of the major nightmare of mobile developer is out of memory error in java,it means you have consumed the Heap memory in VM and having strong reference to the objects created.since, we have created strong reference to the object GC can't collect it to free the VM Heap memory.especially, when you're about to load Bitmap through JPEG image into the memory it's really nightmare for developers to manage the memory.
So, here comes Jake Wharton to help us with his image loading library named as Picasso and it also supports cache,recycling the images,animations and effects.
Developer reference : link
Clear understanding of ListView & Recyclerview :
Listview & Recyclerview is useful view for developers from google engineers is to show large homogeneous data in our mobile device.Consider you have 1000's of contacts in your contacts app where you need to show them all on demand, you can't load all the contacts in to memory at once where you may lead to Out of Memory error very soon.
Obviously, some Algorithmic students may claim that we could use binary search algorithm to view the contacts, but in real life is the user is going to type and search contacts every time ? That will be a bad User Experience.so,how does the listview or recyclerview works ?
yes we've learnt in our concepts of operating system namely Paging concept.when the listview gets initialise it measures the height of the layout and decides the number of list to be shown in the view and loads the particular count of data from adapter to the view, it also prefetches few data set front and back to manage stagger less scrolling.it uses the same object and recycles for other data set and inflates the view into the Listview.Note that Recyclerview is enhanced version of Listview.
difference between Listview and Recyclerview - Stackoverflow Link
Developer Reference : link
What the Hell is savedInstanceState bundle ?
before understanding the saving the instance state of View in android, you must be aware of the lifecycle of android application such as onCreate, onStop, onResume, onPause and even more for handling orientation and configuration changes.one of the best video to understand why we need concentrate more on Activity lifecycle.
so, when the apps move foreground and background we need to save our current state of the app so that it, can be resumed when the user once again visits the application.we need to manage this smoothly without any lag while recovering the state of the application.
consider the scenario :
when you type important whatsapp message to your friends/crush, all of a sudden you receive phone call from someone continuing you get facebook message from friend after replying back you come back to whatsapp what if whole message has been destroyed which you have typed already ? It hurts User Experience so,here comes savedinstance state to guarantee you to save some text/image/serializable object for you in background to recover you back when user renters the app.
so, by default activity lifecycle callbacks such as onCreate, onResume , OnPause,onConfigurationChanged passes you bundle to save the state of the current activity before the lifecycle event happens.
Most popular guide for fragments and activity : inthecheesefactoy guide for savedinstancestate
Developer Reference : link
That's it.These were the main challenges I faced and learnt during the Project 2 Android Nanodegree.hope the above resource will be helpful to get started with Android development.
My Screencast of the Project :
Next Project Preview :
The next project was awesome, it's all about using the same source code to optimize the android app to work for Tablet user Interface consuming large amount of user space and handling the orientation changes.
for bugs,hugs and comments just comment below or mail me.Chat with me in G+/Facebook for help and improved version of this article.Share is care.
