my programming journey

GuNews v.2 The GuNews app was updated to version 2. No shiny features, but a few things were added to improve user experience. However the biggest improvement is the potential of data usage reduction. For that there is now an additional switch in the Settings. With it the user can opt out from showing the images in the news list and showing only text. Admittedly it's much more appealing to look at the headlines with relevant images, but that because I'm not concerned of my data usage. Even better I also implemented the Android paging library in the app, which means the app would only fetch necessary headlines. Initially only 10 headlines, which is needed to show on the list. And on the fly the app will fetch more as soon as the user scrolls down the list. The list of changes in this version: Added switch in the Settings for hiding images and tweaked Android paging (to reduce data usage) Code rewriting to adhere to one activity principle. Improved news search func...

GuNews app Finally I published my real first app, GuNews a news headlines app, in the Google Play. It was mainly an exercise in Android programming. And what an exercise! If you want to check it out, click here . I started my programming adventure by taking a nanodegree program in Android programming from Udacity+Google, which I finished in August 2019. When I finished that course I gained a bit self-confidence in Java for Android. However when I tried to rewrite the news app GuNews to follow the recommended Android Architecture Component (Android JetPack), simply AAC, I immediately faced challenges. First I realised that Google has moved on from Java to Kotlin when providing code examples for AAC. Grrrhhh.... I am a total beginner with only basic Java knowledge and must have to deal with a foreign language Kotlin. Second I found out that many solutions provided by diligent coders on stockoverflow are meant for the time before Android before AAC. So it was really a hu...