iOS Developer Challenge
The project should have a simple and minimal UI with some technical milestones:
- Some sort of list to hold the images which updates itself
- Access to the user's location, even in the background
- Network access to a service which provides images based on input
The project could optionally maybe use some sort of short onboarding to communicate the request of the location? Also, error handling could be good, since we have multiple points of failure with the location request, the networking going wrong, or maybe not finding any results?
The project and app should not provide many options when it comes to the device it can run on and the orientations, which is why I disabled them from the beginning. For the first draft of the design, I chose a simple ScrollView to hold static images.
The location manager holds the reference to the CLLocationManager and handles the beginning and end of tracking, as well as location access and state. The next step will be to calculate the distance between the updated locations and to send an event to the delegate once the threshold of 100 meters is passed.
I figured that a coordinator would be helpful for the communication between the location manager and the service that follows. The calculation for the distance was introduced, and for now, I've loaded the coordinates into the ScrollView to test UI and actual location update, both of which work.
So I got my personal API key from Flickr and presumably called the right API. The response is unfortunately XML, which I'll need to parse in the next step.
Unfortunately, the Flickr API response is XML, which requires a custom parser instead of JSON. This has cost me a bit more time. Now the image URL is constructed, and in the next step, I'll attempt to load those images in the ScrollView.
The images are now loading into the scroll view with the help of Apple's great AsyncImage. The handlers for loading and error state are very minimal but are the starting point for a potential improvement in the future. I also found that some images appear twice, which is a bug that needs addressing.
The image service occasionally returned duplicated images. Since the ScrollView and for each operation relied on the image as an identifier, the duplicated images caused issues.
Register the app so it can receive location updates in the background and is allowed to make network calls so that images get loaded while the phone is locked. According to the settings, images should load in the background - but it seems, looking at the network logs, that they load once the app is active again. I will work on that at the end once I'm done with everything else.
I figured that I would like to add some usability improvements such as a user-initiated location access request. Also, showing the user the message that their location access might not be enough for background activities or that no access was granted. Also, a clear button is very handy - both for customers as well as me while testing 😄.
I'm not able to solve the background activity issue in time. Ideally, the network calls would continue even when the app is inactive. Besides that, I'm pretty happy with the result I achieved within the last 3.5 hours. Further improvements could be to split some code from the ContentView into a designated ViewModel and, of course, to write some tests. Most of the code is injectable with some mock variations of the class.