- Right now this project is on stand-by since this requires more time and attention for every feature you add and right now I'm busy developing an app for Play Store, but below you can see the functions and all the things you can do.
- There may be unexpected bugs (for example a basic one is rotating). Sorry about that I'll fix it as soon as I have free time.
- This project was made when I was less experienced and knew a lot less but I learnt so much from this!🙂.
Blog App is an app to let users create an account to share their thoughts and interact with other people, it's inspired in Twitter.
The app is built with Kotlin and Firebase using Cloud Firestore to store the data, Firebase Storage to save data images and Cloud Functions to execute the work on server-side. Client-side uses Kotlin and server-side use Node.js (Cloud Functions from Firebase).
- Authentication
- Watch timeline of users you follow and yourself
- Add a post
- Search user on the app
- See user profile with their posts
- Add profile and background picture to your profile
- Edit profile (Also change username)
- Follow or unfollow user
- Dagger-Hilt
- Coroutines Flow
- LiveData
- Material Design
- MVI
| Login | Sign up |
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| Feed welcome | Feed with posts | Post detail |
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| Search idle state | Search user |
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| Profile logged in user | Profile with motion layout | Follow other user profile |
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| Edit profile |
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MVI is the newest architecture for Android and I've just done a project with MVVM architecture so I wanted to get in touch with other architectures to get a better understanding and experience of the different benefits that each one can contribute to my app.
Having said this, MVI is a single source of truth. That means that this way, you're sure that your Models won't be modified in multiple places and will maintain a single state until the user makes an intention.
Cycle Representation of MVI
Dagger Hilt is the latest Dagger framework released, it covers DI (Dependency Injection) in a simpler and efficient way. DI task is to create objects and manage them in the whole app.
Dagger Hilt benefits are:
- Help us to reduce boilerplate
- make our code recyclable
- easy use in testing
- Simplified configuration (From dagger 2 DI)
- Standardized components
If you're interested in Dagger Hilt and want to get more in touch with this framework then I recommend you to checkout my spanish article where I show with visual graphics and different examples how Dagger Hilt works. You can also checkout my sample app that I've built for the article.
1. How are you going to structure your database to optimize the read/written/updating in without getting high bill from Firebase? (Supposing that we had to take care of that)
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I started writting down on a notebook on how I would want to see my NoSql database and the process of getting any information from any document/collection. For example, when I was writting the Post model I did put a member variable to save the profile picture of the user who pertained that post. That didn't make sense since the user could change the profile picture and then firebase would had to update X quantity posts to set the new profile picture. So I refactored that part and, set the profile picture member variable to the user model and that would reduce the operations and would be so much more efficient.
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Other thing I took care of was saving the data on the cache. Since Room library hasn't been implemented yet, I've used maps and lists to store posts, users or other documents from other collections, in result reads have been optimized.
In general I had a lot of new experiences that I've learned there and I hadn't any problem with refactoring the app if that made it better and learn from it.
2. What's the plan for the design of the app?
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At first I had an idea to focus on blue color but I wasn't sure how to match them together in the app, but I knew that I wanted to make sure the user can recognize differents part of the app making it easy for him to navigate which I did. Finally implemented 4 tones of blue.
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I planned using Material Design since it offers us a clean layout and accessibility to easily modify it.
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I did add different animations to let users know what is going on the app when they press some view component.
Note: I've been mostly focused on UI and UX aswell since I was lacking of experience and knowledge on this area and I was looking to improve myself there. The result was good but definitely there's room to improve, but I'm satisfied with the results.
3. What project planning did you use and how do you stay organized with the tasks?
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I had a lot of different project planning tools to use here, for example Trello (Which I did use in my final project) but this time I did use a notebook. The thing that made me use a notebook was merely personal, I simply like writing on a notebook, but I wouldn't had any problem to use any technology tool for work.
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I started writing down the tasks that I had to do, then I separately started creating little tasks for every task. I would set different levels E/M/H (Easy/Medium/Hard) and then I'd set them with a ✔️ once finished or, if I had any problem then I'd write down everything I've done until now and continue with other tasks.