The app
1. The app needs to show four images as shown below, describing your
favourite foods. You are very welcome to customise what your app shows
(in the past we've had favourite paintings, for example), as long as your
eport clearly states this and the images are not objectionable. Stick with
food if you are not sure.
2. The data kept for each image should include the name of the food, the date
the photo was taken, the type of cuisine, and a rating from 0-5 (you can
alter these for other domains, e.g., name of painting instead of food name,
artistic period for type of cuisine, but the data types must remain the
same). You will need to create a model for this -- note data should not be
stored to disk, rather kept in memory. The title and rating should be shown
under each image in the first activity. For the extension, at least one of
your attributes should use a non-TextView widget, such as a RatingBar, a
Switch, or a RadioGroup.
3. When an image is clicked, a new screen with further details needs to be
shown along with the image. The data needs to be passed as a Parcelable
object. The non-TextView widget needs to show the co
ect value on
activity creation. Explain the components of your Intent and the
advantanges of using Parcelable objects on Android.
4. Your layout can be a grid as shown, in which case TableLayout might be
useful. Otherwise Constraint or Linear layouts can be used, and images can
e presented four in a row. My example is rather tricky and uses
compound views -- this is only recommended for those with low
frustration levels or the need to simplify their views, and you are welcome
to use single views.
5. Additional requirements for this task are to demonstrate good use of Kotlin
features in your code (such as scope functions) and to provide some simple
sketches of the two screens in your app. The latter could be made using
XD or Figma or could be freehand sketches. Please note that this does not
mean "pretty" designs should be made -- it is simply testing whether you
can use sketching tools to think about and communicate your app's UI.
Extension
1. Turn the second activity into a form, and update the details for the images.
In order to make life easy for your user, you should enter the existing
text/values into the form for editing, rather than presenting empty inputs.
The new details should be saved on pressing back (there should not be an
explicit save button), and should be shown to the user in the first activity.
Do not use persistent data for this task.
2. Keyboards should only show useful inputs for particular fields, such as
dates for date strings.
3. E
or checking should be included for required fields -- this could be length
of string, valid dates, etc.
4. This is a good app for UI testing. Note that RatingBars are not easy to test
with Espresso so you should focus on text and other widgets.
Checklist
• The app contains four images of reasonable size.
• A model for the image data is used, which implements the Parcelable
protocol, and is populated.
• On an image click, details about that image are shown.
• Code is commented, indented co
ectly, uses understandable variable
names, shows some evidence of decomposition and design to avoid
epeated code, makes use of Android practices, e.g., string resources
instead of hard-coded strings, and makes use of Kotlin features, e.g., scope
functions.
• Sketches of your UX are included in the report.
• As an extension, edit the data for a particular image and show this update
in the first activity. UI tests are included.
Tips
• The tutorial exercises should cover the steps needed to make this app. Feel
free to ask for forums for help using the tutorial exercises or other samples;
code or step-by-step processes that are clearly related to this app should
not be shared.
• If you plan to go to D or HD, save the really fancy stuff for the later tasks!
• Please do not use RecyclerViews or lists for this task. Fragments are not
equired either -- if you're not sure how to use them, leave them out.
• One thing that has tripped up students with less programming experience
in the past on a similar task is the structuring of the data. You need to
create a Parcelable object anyway -- use this to store the data for each
image (maybe have a function or even a separate object for initialising your
data?), and then have a list or a
ay of these in your main activity.
• For more information on RatingBar, for those who want to use it,
see https:
developer.android.com
eference/android/widget/RatingBar (L
inks to an external site.). In order to constrain the number of stars shown,
check the layout_width setting.
• To get the integer id for a resource, such as an image,
esources.getIdentifier() might be useful. resources.getDrawable() will also
e useful for showing an image given an integer id.
• For more information on scope functions,
see https:
kotlinlang.org/docs
eference/scope-functions.html (Links to
an external site.)
• A Java-based tutorial on compound views can be found
at https:
www.vogella.com/tutorials/AndroidCustomViews/article.html (L
inks to an external site.).
https:
developer.android.com
eference/android/widget/RatingBa
https:
developer.android.com
eference/android/widget/RatingBa
https:
kotlinlang.org/docs
eference/scope-functions.html
https:
kotlinlang.org/docs
eference/scope-functions.html
https:
www.vogella.com/tutorials/AndroidCustomViews/article.html
https:
www.vogella.com/tutorials/AndroidCustomViews/article.html