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.