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!
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