Step 3

This next post will detail my work as part of my Android Udacity program rather than my Actualize program as I had more learning experiences with my struggles in Android this past two weeks. Mostly detailing some of the issues I had while working on their halfway project an android application focused around gathering movie data and displaying details about it such as trailers, reviews and similar materials.

I had already completed step one in which I made JSON pull requests, parsed the data and used an image adapter to display the appropriate images for each film. The second part dealt with more complicated data types than simple data primitives and static images which was mostly what I had to do in part one. Part two involved pulling trailer videos and allowing them to be played inside the app while also correctly displaying reviews.

My first hurdle came from trying to figure out how the actual videos were being stored. I realized an entire movie file can’t be stored and saved as basic JSON data but I wasn’t really sure what I was parsing. It took an embarrassingly long time to figure out I could simply use the request in my browser first before trying to parse it in the app environment. IMBD (The database I am using for this app) stores it’s movie trailer data as a single hashed ID string which… was not as useful as I would of hoped because I had no idea how to use it. I had a string and the API docs were not particularly helpful on how to actually apply it.

Google and stack overflow were a bit chaotic as I had trouble narrowing down my search from “Playing videos inside an Android app” which as you can imagine there were a lot of different ways to accomplish this. I eventually had my mentor in the program point me towards the most straightforward approach. The youtube android API which I hadn’t realized existed but makes obvious sense there was one.

After that I worked a bit further and managed to apply some of the techniques I had discussed in previous posts to great effect. When one I managed to get a working copy of the Youtube Android Player in my app I was confused because as the Youtube Player was successful being created but no movie would end up being played, no movie player was even visible on my activity (For those unfamiliar with Android the activity is essentially the current page the app is displaying). Upon pausing and reflecting on what the code was supposed to be doing instead of trying rapid fire fixes I noticed the particular use case I was invoking for the API wasn’t the correct tool I needed and via comparing with other online guides I managed to fix the code fairly quickly with only a bit of debugging.

I think the biggest pull away I had from this experience was trying to do things out of order. I had started with trying to pull the data without first understanding what I am trying to pull. Then I tried to figure out how to play a video in my app without first understanding what tools are available and how my video format was stored. I managed to catch myself in the debugging step with trying things out of order but I think calming down and plotting out my steps before I start typing will save me more effort in the long run.

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