[CodePath Spring '15] Week 1 Assignment: Rotten Tomatoes App

Inspired by Flixster, this is an app that displays movies currently in the theaters and newly released DVDs using the Rotten Tomatoes API.

Time spent: ~20 hours

Features

Required

• [ X ] User can view a list of movies. Poster images load asynchronously.
• [ X ] User can view movie details by tapping on a cell.
• [ X ] User sees loading state while waiting for the API.
• [ X ] User sees error message when there is a network error.
• [ X ] User can pull to refresh the movie list.

Optional

• [ X ] Added a tab bar for Theaters and DVD.
• [ X ] Added custom icons in tab bar (from The Noun Project)
• [ X ] Customized the navigation bar (custom text depending on tab bar selection)
• [ X ] In detail view, first loading thumbnail size before loading detail size (original size not needed given my design of the detail view)
• [ X ] Displaying the fresh/rotten tomato and fresh/spilt popcorn icons based on critic and audience score, respectively

Other notables

• App is currently designed for iPhone 5/5s
• Design of app was inspired by the Flixster app who owns Rotten Tomato (I happen to know the founders of Flixster)
• Running time is displayed in human friendly way (e.g. 2 hr. 14 min.)
• If no critic score (which I guess can happen with new movies), "NONE" is displayed in place of fresh/rotten tomato icon and score
• Beyond getting a functioning app, I spent a good amount of time on code organization, clarity, and patterns:
  • Defined a Movie object instead of using NSDictionary
  • API code was abstracted into RottenTomatoesAPI using callbacks for code reuse
  • All constants were defined in Constants.swift (unclear if this is a good pattern as I'm new to the language)

Walkthroughs

This is a walkthrough of the basic features:

This shows the Network Error message when wifi is turned off. Error message is removed when wifi is turned back on and the API calls succeed:

Credits

• Flixster
• Rotten Tomatoes API
• The Noun Project
• AFNetworking