4.1. Introduction

Twitter’s search mechanism makes it easy to follow trending topics being discussed by more than 500 million Twitter users. Searches can be fine tuned using Twitter’s search operators (overviewed in Section 4.2), often resulting in lengthy search strings that are time consuming and cumbersome to enter on a mobile device. The Twitter Searches app (Fig. 4.1) allows you to save your favorite search queries with short tag names that are easy to remember (Fig. 4.1(a)). You can then touch a tag name to quickly and easily follow tweets on a given topic (Fig. 4.1(b)). As you’ll see, the app also allows you to share, edit and delete saved searches.

a) App with several saved searches

b) App after user touches “Deitel”

Fig. 4.1 | Twitter Searches app.

The app supports both portrait and landscape device orientations. In some apps, you’ll do this by providing separate layouts for each orientation. In this app, we support both orientations by designing the GUI so that it can dynamically adjust GUI component sizes based on the current orientation.

First, you’ll test-drive the app. Then we’ll overview the technologies used to build it. Next, you’ll design the app’s GUI. Finally, we’ll present the app’s complete source code and walk through the code, discussing the app’s new features in more detail.