Description

Le Colisée is an independant movie theater in Montbéliard (France) and does not have a strong online presence (no website, communication with clients made only via Facebook). To know what movies were currently shown, three solutions were available:

• walk to the movie theater and find a program
• check their Facebook profile and then download a PDF file with the list of all the movies shown this week
• consult AlloCine.fr, a website giving info on French movie theaters, search for "Le Colisée" and then go through a (bloated) page with the list of all the movies

The lack of quick and easy solution and my wish to play with Google's Material Design led me to develop an Android application.

The first step was to find a way to get the showtimes of the movie theater. The website AlloCiné was the only way to get the data so with the help of jsoup, a HTML Parser library, a program was made in Java to download and provide a list of the current movies (along with a lot of details about them). The idea was to take care of all the "logic" in this small program and then only focus on how to present this data in the Android application.

Once finished, I could start working on the Android application. While not being very complicated to use (a list of movies is shown and if you click on one, it gives you more details about it), I had to deal with threads and asynchronous requests to download data from the Internet (the library Glide was pretty useful for images), implement Materiel Design elements (customised cardviews, collapsing toolbars, transitions, ...) and provide different layouts (portrait/landscape for phone and tablets).

The last thing to do was working on the applciation design. I liked the idea of having a dark background (like in a cinema) with some touch of red (like the seats in a cinema!) and after a few tries I ended up with something I was satisfied with. The style of the logo mimics the real Colisée logo.

Finally, after testing it on several devices and as I was satisfied with the application, I uploaded it on Google Play Store.