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!