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GiphySearcher

Tinkering wtih MVVM and the Giphy API.

Requirements

  • Swift 3
  • Xcode 8.0
  • iOS 9.3

Pods:

  • Moya/RxSwift, Alamofire, SwiftyJSON (Networking)
  • FLAnimatedImage, Nuke/FLAnimatedImageExtension (Caching and animated GIF support)
  • RxCocoa, RxSwift, NSObject+Rx (Functional Reactive)

Installation

  • Clone this repo to your desktop

  • Open GiphySearcher.xcworkspace

  • Select an iPad device in the simulator. (For simplicity, the app is constrained to run on the iPad in portrait orientation)

  • Build and run! (The public Giphy API key is hard-coded into the app.)

  • Per the spec, all displayed GIFs animate and are filtered for family-friendliness. 😀 In addition, search results that have ever trended are highlighted in the bottom right with the following icon:

Miscellaneous Technical Highlights

This was a fun little project. Major kudos to the Artsy team for open-sourcing Eidolon/Kiosk, from which I learned a number of great design patterns (MVVM and otherwise).

  • Moya is an excellent way to set up the networking layer in an organized, logical manner. Furthermore, its RxSwift extension enables more seamless interaction with other functional reactive components.
  • It seems both RxCocoa and RxSwift are worth using in a complementary way. I haven't developed a preference for either, yet, though.
  • Framerates and GIF caching: Getting smooth framerates was one of the trickiest parts! I ended up up evaluating a couple different pods. Out-of-the-box, FLAnimatedImage was smooth, but at the cost of high RAM usage (even when used with SDWebImage for caching). Kingfisher has some nice cache customization options and seemed to manage memory much better, but was too jittery. I settled on Nuke and its FLAnimatedImage extension as a middle ground and am pretty happy with the result.

Opportunities for Enhancement

  • Show larger version of GIF when selected. Currently, there is no interaction aside from search.
  • Enable API pagination (wasn't able to get around to this)

Unit Testing

...

No tests yet! But coming soon. In the mean time, I've tried to deliberately expose my dependencies, and one of the benefits of Moya is how it treats testing as a first-class citizen by requiring network requests to be stubbed. I used Paw, which is a handy little Mac utility that helps create JSON files for stubbing endpoint responses. The more I learn about testing, the more I believe in TDD. However, the goal of this project was to focus on MVVM concepts and tools, but I aim to add tests in the near future.