zoul / movies

A sample Swift iOS client for themoviedb.org

This is a simple Movie DB client for iPhones written in Swift. I use it mostly to try out new ideas and technologies.

movies's Issues

Improve JSON parsing

I don’t mind parsing the JSON by hand, it’s nicely explicit. What I don’t like is repeating the property names:

guard let dict = jsonObject as? NSDictionary,
    let id = dict["id"] as? Int,
    let title = dict["title"] as? String,
    let voteAverage = dict["vote_average"] as? Float,
    let backdropPath = dict["backdrop_path"] as? String,
    let overview = dict["overview"] as? String,
    let releaseDate = dict["release_date"] as? String
    else { return nil }

self.id = id
self.title = title
self.voteAverage = voteAverage
self.backdropPath = backdropPath
self.overview = overview
self.releaseDate = releaseDate

I like what Argo does:

return curry(User.init)
      <^> json <| "id"
      <*> json <| "name"
      <*> json <|? "email" // Use ? for parsing optional values
      <*> json <| "role" // Custom types that also conform to Decodable just work
      <*> json <| ["company", "name"] // Parse nested objects
      <*> json <|| "friends" // parse arrays of objects

The interesting trick is using the Curry module, see the accompanying blog post.

Figure out a way to store the API auth token

Right now I have to remove the token from the code before committing, which is dumb. It would be nice to store it in an ignored file, for example.

Enable Travis builds

We want to build the code and run the tests. There’s a nice tutorial over at Swift Talks.

Interactive playgrounds for views

See this post by Kickstarter and the video linked from there. The main idea is having the option to tweak all possible state variables interactively in a playground, instead of having to navigate the live UI to get there. Also, this should enable easy screenshot testing, ie. rendering the screens for various state combinations and then checking them against known “good” screenshots.

• Extract the UI code into a framework that can be imported into a playground
• Patch MovieDetailController so that it can be loaded in a playground
• Patch MovieListController so that it can be loaded in a playground
• Add sample content that can be easily experimented with (a sample Movie, for instance)

Improve caching

Right now the caching is probably completely broken. That could be fixed by setting the right caching options when reading from the webservice, but the real goal here is to detect offline mode and set the cache behaviour accordingly (.useProtocolCachePolicy when online, .returnCacheDataDontLoad when offline?).

Properly parse movie release dates

Right now we simply accept the string returned by the server.

Improve image caching

Right now there’s always an asynchronous call with a placeholder image even if the real image is cached. It would be nice to load the cached images immediately.

Improve error reporting

Right now the errors are just logged, if even that.

Add proper image backend support

See the developer docs regarding images, the current implementation hardcodes a simplified version of the API.