Build a Weather App

Exploring an API

What is an API? What Does it Mean to Use One? This stage will introduce the project and explore an API provided by forecast.io. 7 steps

• Introducing Stormy 2:05
• Android Warm-Up 2 objectives
• What is an API? What Does it Mean to Use One? 4:44
• What is an API? 5 questions
• The Forecast API 3:04
• Creating the Project 3:11
• Review: Forecast and Our Project 5 questions
• Extra Credit Jump-Starting JSONWith your newly created Forecast account, log in and visit developer.forecast.io. Use your personalized URL and just paste it in your browser to explore the JSON. You can format it on a site like prettyjson or using a browser extension like JSONView. Get familiar with the data as we'll use it a lot in this and the subsequent project!

Networking

Even though we use the Web in lots of ways in our daily lives, communicating with the Web and interacting with the information we get is not a trivial task. Let's see how to make networking in Android easy with the help of a 3rd party library called OkHttp. 8 steps

• How Do We Get Data from the Web? 3:11
• Networking on a Mobile Device 1:30
• Review: Networking Basics 5 questions
• Introducing OkHttp 4:03
• Getting the OkHttp Library Using Gradle 4:32
• Adding a Third-Party Dependency 1 objective
• Making an HTTP GET Request with OkHttp 8:31
• Building an HTTP Request 2 objectives
• Extra Credit HTTPlaygroundWith your newfound superpower of getting information from the web, play around with making different HTTP requests using a test URL from http://requestb.in. This site lets you test HTTP GETs and POSTs. See if you can make a successful GET and POST call and display the body of the response in your log.

Concurrency and Error Handling

Concurrency, or doing things together in parallel, is an important property of our system that let's us execute blocks of code simultaneously. In this stage, we take a look at what concurrency exactly means, why it's necessary, and how to make our networking call in a concurrent manner. We'll also learn how to gracefully handle any errors. 9 steps

• Why Do We Use Asynchronous Processing? 4:00
• Why Do We Use Asynchronous Processing? 5 questions
• Making Our Code Asynchronous 5:55
• Executing an Asynchronous Call 2 objectives
• Handling Errors 5:37
• Configuring the Alert Dialog 4:53
• Building an Alert Dialog 4 objectives
• What To Do When the Network is Down 6:53
• What to Do When the Network is Down 5 questions
• Extra Credit Android's AsyncTaskThe Android SDK includes a class called AsyncTask that is useful for executing asynchronous tasks. See if you can add an AsyncTask to an Activity that pretends to do work in the background. You can "pretend" to do long-running work by calling Thread.sleep(long milliseconds) in the task's doInBackground() method. For extra, extra credit, update your progress with a TextView, Toast, or ProgressBar, kind of like this old (but still relevant!) blog post.

Working with JSON

Our weather data is in the JSON format, which is a way of representing data in a simple-to-read manner that is easily parsed and used by programming languages. In this stage we will learn how to parse that data and store it in Java model objects that we can use in our app. 12 steps

• Exploring the Data 3:16
• Creating the Model 2:31
• Creating a Model Object 3 objectives
• Beautiful, Wonderful JSON 3:23
• Review: JSON 5 questions
• Introducing JSONObject 6:02
• Using JSONObject 1 objective
• Setting CurrentWeather from JSON 3:54
• Cleaning Up the Date and Time 7:10
• Formatting a Date 3 objectives
• Setting the Weather Icon 4:00
• Review: Working with JSON 5 questions
• Extra Credit Master JSONWhat else can you get from our forecast data? Parse it further using JSONObject and JSONArray and write more details to the log. See if you can display the extended forecast in a meaningful way in the log.

Building the Weather UI

With all the pieces in place we can finally display our forecast data in an interface designed by one of our Treehouse designers. 8 steps

• Starting at the Center 5:58
• Centering a TextView 2 objectives
• Adding the Upper Half 7:58
• Adding an ImageView 2 objectives
• Working with LinearLayouts 8:08
• Using layout_weight 1 objective
• Finishing the Lower Half 4:16
• Playing with Gravity 1 objective
• Extra Credit Moar DataWhat else can you display from the forecast? Add some elements from the forecast to this app. You can add some other "current" details, or even add new sections or Activities for other forecast information.

Hooking Up the Model to the View

Our last task is to wire up the data from our CurrentWeather model to our freshly implemented user interface. 9 steps

• Using Butter Knife for Views 4:36
• Using Butter Knife for Views 3 objectives
• Plugging in the Data 6:59
• Setting the Weather Icon 3:00
• Setting Views with Data 2 objectives
• Adding a Refresh Button 9:00
• Using a Progress Bar 3 objectives
• Wrapping Up 1:27
• Review: Hooking Up the Model to the View 5 questions
• Extra Credit Animate All the ThingsOne way to create a better user experience is to add appropriate animations. Try adding some to the Views in our layout. Get started with some basics or use this really useful animation library from GitHub: AndroidViewAnimations. Or check out our Animations and Transitions course and use that to update your weather app. :)