Pura Interview Challenge

[patch-benjamin]

Simulator.Screen.Recording.-.iPhone.16.Pro.-.2024-09-29.at.23.56.56.mp4

OVERVIEW:
I made several significant changes in this code challenge. I went over the 2-4 hour time box, but I'll mark where 4 hours would have been for your reference. The commit history should be pretty easy to glance over (though is not super descriptive).

The app approach I went with for my changes was to make a kind of Frayer Model app that shows you the definition, images, synonyms, and lets you write notes on your take aways.

STEPS TAKEN:

• Converted API to use Async Await (better than Combine 😉)
• Rewrote app in SwiftUI (and removed all UIKit code). Followed an MVVM-ish architecture. If I spent more time on this project, an architecture cleanup probably would have been my next step.
• Added "history" of searches using SwiftData.
• Added a "Personal Note" section where you can add notes about the word you looked up.
• <4 hour mark was probably around here>
• Added the Thesaurus API and displayed synonyms for the word.
• Added an image search API (a random one I found online) and displayed images for the word.

I didn't get to spend as much time on this as I would have liked and I chased the features rather than polishing the app as much as I would have if I were to make an actual PR for this.

TODOS:
Some things I would like to improve:

• Some of the UI elements could be consolidated into a modifier or something.
• Navigation could enforce certain stacks (first this page, then that page), which it doesn't right now.
• I could show the definition UI before/while I load the synonyms and images to make sure the user doesn't get blocked by all 3 API calls before being able to see anything.
• API could be organized a bit better - definition and thesaurus are kind of related, but the images one is not - I have a fun idea I wanted to try where each API call is an @observable class.
• I think the Destination cases could not take a WordEntry and I could have the RootView be the one to provide the appropriate data for each view (or maybe extract it out into a "navigation creator" view or something).
• SwiftData could be updated to have "Preview" values to make previews more consistent. AsyncImage sucks and should be replaced with something better.
• I have no Error UI / handling and it would be really nice to capitalize on the error support the API provides.
• Remove searchable and manually put in a TextField at the top cause searchable suuuucks.

Anyway, you get the idea - lots of things I'd love to dive into but I didn't want to go super crazy over time so I called it here.

[patch-benjamin]

This guy was kind of a fun little distraction. I wanted to make the loading spinner be like a sun behind the "default image" image.