Android Twitter Reader

Following on from the RSS Reader, some time last year I was investigating using Twitter in some of my apps, so I put together this simple Twitter reader (it only reads tweets from a given user - it doesnt allow posting etc)




For the most it is the same as the RSS Reader in terms of laying out the Android Lists and the layout.xml, so I won't go over that, I will just go through the Twitter integration.

The first step is to retrieve all the tweets, for this I am using the very useful Twitter4J Java library that simply wraps the Twitter API with a Java API

Twitter twitter = new TwitterFactory().getInstance();
  List statuses = new ArrayList();
     try {
   statuses = twitter.getUserTimeline(screenName);
  } catch (TwitterException e) {
   Log.e("Twitter", "Error logging in to Twitter");
   Log.e("Twitter", e.getMessage());
  }

Once you have the list of latest tweets, I convert them in to JSON so my listAdapter can process them more easily:

ArrayList JOBS = new ArrayList();
  try {
   if (statuses.size()>0){
    for (Status s : statuses){
     String avatar = "http://" + s.getUser().getProfileImageURL().getHost() + s.getUser().getProfileImageURL().getPath();
     JSONObject object = new JSONObject();
     object.put("tweet", s.getText());
     String timePosted = Utility.getDateDifference(s.getCreatedAt());
     object.put("tweetDate", timePosted);
     object.put("author", s.getUser().getName());
     object.put("avatar", avatar);
     object.put("userObj", s.getUser());
     object.put("tweetId", s.getId());
     
     JOBS.add(object); 
    }
   }else{
    JSONObject object = new JSONObject();
    object.put("tweet", "You have not logged in yet! Please log on to view latest tweets");
    object.put("author", "");
    JOBS.add(object);
   }

  } catch (JSONException e1) {
   Log.e("JSON", "There was an error creating the JSONObject", e1);
  }

And thats pretty much that! the listAdapter just pulls the information out of the JSON objects as per above and displays as necessary. The only other thing I will show is a little Date util class to make the date posted a little more fun:

public static String getDateDifference(Date thenDate){
        Calendar now = Calendar.getInstance();
        Calendar then = Calendar.getInstance();
        now.setTime(new Date());
        then.setTime(thenDate);

        
        // Get the represented date in milliseconds
        long nowMs = now.getTimeInMillis();
        long thenMs = then.getTimeInMillis();
        
        // Calculate difference in milliseconds
        long diff = nowMs - thenMs;
        
        // Calculate difference in seconds
        long diffMinutes = diff / (60 * 1000);
        long diffHours = diff / (60 * 60 * 1000);
        long diffDays = diff / (24 * 60 * 60 * 1000);

  if (diffMinutes<60){
   if (diffMinutes==1)
    return diffMinutes + " minute ago";
   else
    return diffMinutes + " minutes ago";
  } else if (diffHours<24){
   if (diffHours==1)
    return diffHours + " hour ago";
   else
    return diffHours + " hours ago";
  }else if (diffDays<30){
   if (diffDays==1)
    return diffDays + " day ago";
   else
    return diffDays + " days ago";
  }else {
   return "a long time ago..";
  }
 }