30 Days of Kotlin

30 Days of Kotlin with Google Developers is an initiative to improve the understanding of Kotlin and apply it in real projects using Google resources (codelabs, sessions with Googlers) between 7th May - 7th of June.

Cholti |

The name of the app, "Cholti" (often followed by "bhasha" or language) refers to the colloquial tongue used in Bengali language in a regular and informal sense. The idea of the application is to provide Bengali () pronunciation of some essentials. The chosen categories are Words, Phrases, Colors and Numbers. Each category has 5 distinct elements that have their english and bengali script along with the proper bengali pronunciation. The illustrations in app are original artworks by two of my friends Ritwik and Rajwrita. The voice that you get to hear is of my friend Puja.

Idea behind the logo: For almost all of us this is the first image that is visually associated with learning bengali, it is page 1 of sohoj path, and therefore it only makes sense that any newcomer to the language should be given the same treatment. ~ Ritwik Raha.

Concepts implemented in the project

1. Recycler-view.
2. Data-Binding.
3. Intents.
4. Guidelines with constraint-layout.
5. Material Library.

Details

Recycler-View

In the application there are five elements in each category. The elements had to be encapsulated in cards. Each card is used from the material library. These cards were inflated in a view holder and were shown with the help of an adapter that fetched dynamic data and the recycler view. We wanted have a pager like behaviour, hence had to make a custom class which emulates the clip behaviour. While scrolling you will have the card centre itself. The creators class has another recycler view set up which is VERTICAL. The viewholder had to changed and the jpg images are loaded with a 3rd party library named Glide.

Data-Binding

With the problem of findViewById the application had to go through the entire view hierarchy each time the activity is created. With the data binding scheme, there was generated classes out of which we could build the view object and cache them. The accessing of view reduced the overhead and the app performance increased drastically.

Intents

With the project I understood what an implicit and explicit intent means. In the creators page each creator has the twitter, linkedin and github profiles linked. With implicit intents I had to launch the url and open it in the application that can help with the Intent. The main page leads to different in-app activities, which is achieved by explicit intents. In kotlin the reference operator had to be used for explicit activity intents.

Guidelines

With the constraint layout I have used the guidelines to make the application screens as responsive as I can. The percentage with guidelines are really helpful, which helps the widgets to grow or shrink according to the device screen dimensions.

Material Library

With the application we have tried to keep it along the material design guidelines as far as possible. The material library no only helped me in building the material cards, but also changed the shape of toast and dialog box.