We've Got Images!

Hello everyone! We have finally made the big jump over our last hurdle, which is was obtaining images from the Observer's RSS feed and using them in our app! 

Our app design/layout is very dependent on visualizations and the use of the images that corresponded to the published articles. However, we realized after we completely designed and coded out the layout that the images for the news articles were not actually included in the RSS feed for the website. When we met with the ITS department to talk about push notifications we also mentioned our image crisis. They suggested also writing a script to retrieve the images from the Word Press database. However, we again decided against this and found a plug-in that would place the image URL for each article into the RSS feed. And it worked!

Once we had access to the images, Riley, was able to retrieve the URL by searching in the RSS feed for the image tag, which contains the URL, and parsing the text to obtain the String of the URL under the source attribute of the image tag. Once we had the String of the URL, Lauren, was able to successfully obtain the image from the URL and store it as a Drawable in Android Studio. Once we had a Drawable of the image we could easily place it in the layout as desired! However, there are some stories that do not have an image that corresponds with them. Thus, we have an image of the Observer "O" as a default place holder. 

What's next?!

Now we have all the basic functionality we need for our app to work. Our next steps are cleaning up the app. This includes smoother transitions between activities, refactoring our code, replace place holder images for the categories selector layout, and more.

We will be presenting the beta version of our app on Tuesday 3-5pm in Olin 202! Everyone is welcome! 

The Final Stretch

Hello! We apologize it has been a littler longer since our last post. Team Newspaper hit a standstill in progress due to our individual application projects due week 8 and also waiting to hear back form Augustana's ITS department. 

We finally were able to talk to the Observers web developer in the ITS department on Wednesday about implementing the push notification plug-in. However, it turns out the plug-in we found requires a newer version of PHP than what the server the website is on has. Hitting another wall we had to go back and research other ways to implement the push notifications. The reason we feel push notifications is so important is because it is really the true distinction between our app versus the website. 

We had the opportunity on Friday to sit down with the ITS web developer and discuss other options and how he can help. He was able to give us access to the database that stores all the website information and suggested us writing a script to find when a new story was published to send out a notification. While this seemed like our best/only option we didn't feel it would be feasible since it would require constantly or semi-constantly running the script to see if a new story was published. It wasn't the most elegant approach. 

We decided to do a little more digging and were able to find another plug-in that works on older version of PHP, but without administrative access to the website and the limited communication with the ITS department we couldn't test if this new plug-in would work. Therefore, Dr. Stonedahl decided to create our own dummy WordPress website. Having the dummy site allows us to test the plug-in and PHP code as often as we would like without worrying about breaking the site. 

Team Newspaper member, Andrew, was able to successfully get push notifications working using the dummy site! The way this works is our app will send it's individual device registration token to the WordPress website. We are currently using SharedPreferences to keep track of whether or not the app has already been registered. Whenever a post is made, there's some PHP code that will be called and uses GCM to send a notification to every app. 

Now since we know the plug-in words we are hoping to get it installed into the Observer's WordPress site! Only one week left!  

Progress

What have we done?

It has been a week since the Alpha Demos and we have made some substantial progress! We have completely implemented the ability to search for articles on the app. If you want to search for stories about basketball or even yourself you can do it! 

At first we thought it was going to be difficult to implement a search method on the app. We also had to take into consideration the line between an mobil app and the actual website. We want our application to be a simple and straight forward way to obtain the news. Thus we questioned having the ability to search for articles. However, we since it was something the client requested we went forward. 

Add the ability to search was actually quite straight forward. We have already installed all of the code necessary to retrieve stories from the RSS feed. So all we had to do was figure out how to search the feed itself for articles containing the search keywords. We found that all you had to do was attached the query words to the end of the RSS feed link. This then filtered the data by searching for articles that contained those key words. We used that link just as we do in the home page to grab those stories and display them in a list view on a new activity. 

The same process will be applied when we organize the stories by section (i.e. sports, arts, opinions). We can search the articles based on a category/section tag the RSS feed attaches to them. 

We March On..

With only a few weeks left in the term we still have a lot of work ahead of us. We are still struggling with accessing the images/thumbnails that correspond the the article. We are hoping to talk to ITS within the next week to talk about how we can obtain those images. We have researched and found that we can add code to the Word Press website featured.php to attached the images to the RSS feed. However, we have a lack of understanding on how the site works so our hopes is that ITS (who manages the site) can assist us. 

We are also wanting ITS to install a plug in on the website that will allows for push notification to automatically be sent when an article is published. We have done the work necessary to handle a push notification using Google Cloud Messaging within our app and believe that the best way to implement push notifications with Word Press would be through the use of this plugin. 

Thanks for tuning in!!

Alpha Demo

Alpha Demo

Yesterday team newspaper gave their alpha demo presentation and it was a success! We were able to share with our client, the Augustana Observer, our progress and obtain feedback. 

Our App

Below is an image of the home screen of our app. As you can see we have been able to successfully reproduce the mock-up images for the app that were created by the designers. The top half of the screen consists of a view pager that is populated with the most recently published stories. Currently we cannot grab the images that correspond from the stories from the rss feed so we manually placed images of puppies to demonstrate how the view pager will look and function. Not only does it automatically swipe, but you can also manually swipe forward and backward through the stories. You are able to click on the title of the story and it will load a web view of the story.

Below the view pager is a list of the most current stories ordered from newest to oldest. You can also click on each story to load a web view of the story. Since our goal is to only display the stories and the user does not need to interact with the web page beyond reading it we choose to use a web view. A web view is View that displays web pages in an Activity. In order to access the web pages our app does require internet access. The web views also assists us in the layout and formatting of the stories. 

The Future

Our clients are happy with our progress so far! Our future plans are to hopefully find a way to gain access to the images that correspond to each article through the rss feed. We have read that there is some way on the Word Press website to make sure the images are tagged into the feed so our goal is to try that and see if it works. We also plan on implementing push notifications so that every new story that gets published will be pushed to each users phone. We currently have the code working to manually send notifications, all we have to do is apply a plug-in to the website that will allow for automatic notifications. We have also implemented a search into our app that allows user to search for specific stories. When the user makes a query it will pull up a list of stories (similar to the one at the bottom of the home screen) that contain the keyword they search for. 

We also plan on implementing a navigation bar that will organize the stories based on their section (i.e. sports). This way if the user is specifically interested in the sports section they can simply navigate to it and read all stories pertaining to Augustana sports. 

We are very excited to continue working on the Augustana Observer app and hope to have a great functional product for our clients. 

Welcome Back!

WELCOME BACK!

We hope everyone one had a good break spending time with their friends and family for the holidays. I know we definitely felt like break was too short. 

Over break Team Newspaper made a lot of progress on our app! A lot of the work we did was spent researching how to incorporate different elements into the application, including push notifications, retrieving stories from the RSS feed, and completing the user interface.

We believe having the client involved in the development process is crucial. We want the application to be a representation of their visions versus our own. We are just the technical side. Therefore, the graphics were designed by student designers that work for the Augustana Observer. Below are two pictures of their designs. What we did was use their designs as reference to what the app should look like. Having a visual aide helped a lot during the coding process and enabled us to stay connected with our clients, as well as provide an app that they visually enjoy. 

Our goals this week is to bring everything together! We currently have all the pieces that are required to make the app successful, but we need to combine them all to produce a functioning prototype.

We will be demoing a beta version of our application on Monday, January 16 at 2:30pm. Anyone is welcome to come see our progress!

Extra! Extra! Read all about it!

Hello to all our avid followers! Team Newspaper is back again with our first progress report.

This week (and some part of last week), we have begun planning the build of the Augustana Observer app.  We have taken some initial steps to get us as ready as possible to begin the actual software developing of the app.

The first step, of course, was to meet with our clients, the Observer team, and learn what they wanted in the app for design and features.  The general idea seemed to be that the simpler the better and that they wanted the app to push out notifications for breaking stories or even certain types of stories.  Simple enough, right? 😁Obviously, this will be a more touch and go process so we'll be meeting up with them again soon to keep us going in the right direction.  We also plan on meeting with their designers to see what they had in mind when it comes to the design aspect, something we all agreed would be great since none of us have much experience doing that!

Some other steps taken were to look into the different pieces of software that we will need to understand going forward, such as push notifications and getting information from a website, in our case the Observer site itself.  We were able to get two working prototypes of each software so we are definitely in good shape there!

We are excited to get started coding soon and hope to make ways before we go on break!

Whats black and white and "red" all over?

Whats black and white and "red" all over?

That's right, A NEWSPAPER!

WELCOME

Since this is Team Newspaper's first blog post I would like to first introduce you to our members and explain the purpose of this blog. Team Newspaper is a group of four Augustana College seniors who are participating in the computer science senior inquiry course.

MEMBERS

Riley Moss

Riley is a computer science and business administration double major from Oak Forest, IL. On campus he is a member of the Rho Nu Delta fraternity.

Andrew Bainter

Andrew is a computer science major with a mathematics minor from Coal Valley, IL. On campus he is a member of the Symphonic Band Orchestra.

Minh Le

Minh is a computer science and economics major from Hanoi, Vietnam. Last year Minh participated in the programming contest and he is also the hip hop music director for the Augie radio station.

Lauren Johnson 

Lauren is an engineering physics major with minors in computer science and mathematics from Saint Joseph, IL. On campus she is a peer mentor and member of the Augustana cheerleading team.

PURPOSE

Now I suppose you are wondering why we are here and what the purpose of this blog is. Well, during our time here at Augustana pursuing a degree or minor in computer science we have gained the skills necessary to be successful in the computer science field. Now, we are putting them to the test. During the next 8 or so weeks we will be developing an Android application for the Augustana Observer, our student led newspaper. Our app will provide a sleek and effortless platform to allow students and the community keep up to date with events and news at Augustana at the touch of their phone. We will be keeping everyone updated on our adventure of app creation using this blog, including not only our successes, but also our failures along the way. We hope you join us on this journey!