Dateline 12-21-2016

Time for another app update!!!

This one is going to be really quick because even though I'm happy with what I came up with, this felt like an afterthought assignment to teach us to implement something that was left out from the last assignment.

The reason it felt like an afterthought is, other than creating a settings link in the action bar and my own design differences, it was pretty much the same code only collecting data from a different site. Where the app last took its book information from Google Books to populate search results with things like the book's title, author and summary, this app takes its news article information from The Guardian's site to display a news feed. Display-wise things are different but as I said the mechanics other than the settings tab are pretty much the same.

You can also tell that it was an afterthought by the lessons building up to the app. For all that other assignment lessons they provide well-produced video with quizzes and mini-assignments. This assignment's lessons were all text based which may be partially to blame for why I didn't feel as inspired by the assignment right out the gate. 

Once I started I fell right into work mode and actually had some fun building this one. Since the mechanics are mostly the same, I got most of the mechanics done in a day, then took another day to work on the design and tidy up the code.

And this is what I came up with...

You're not going to get much out of these images because you have to scroll up to see all the content of the main page but I think you can get the idea. If you want to play with it more here is a link where you can install the app if you have an Android phone...

One of my favorite things about this assignment is that the instructor that reviewed it accused me of being a really advanced student and offered some other options to think about when building apps. If only they knew I was an ambitious beginner that had no idea what they were talking about in their suggestions.

Oh well, someday I'll understand their robot language, until then it's off to work for me!!!

Talk to you tomorrow,

The Wicker Breaker