Keywords Alert

alert

Comment

Inspiration

We are a team of postgraduate student in Electrical and Computer Engineering. We found it's part of our life to frequently check many academic journals/conference websites to keep up with the latest trend of the topic we have been working on. This task sometimes gets annoying since it has to be done manually and current web service like Google Alert cannot cater to our needs. Thus, we want to build our own Apps to get this fulfilled.

What it does

The application allows users to type in multiple keywords and websites on which they want to check on. At the frequency the users set, they will get notified by Email and/or push notifications service on their phones.

How we built it

For the Android App, we developed it with Android Studio, using Jsoup for reading and parsing in web crawler module and javax.mail in Email sending module.

For the desktop App, we built it with Python with tkinter GUI, using BeautifulSoup and JSON for parsing and smtplib library for Email sending.

Challenges we ran into

In order to schedule the application at specified intervals, the application must run a service and a new thread to check on backgrounds and send notification. The same applies to the desktop application. The complexity of HTML structures is also a challenge when it comes to correctly and efficiently crawling and parsing.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud to deliver fully functional mobile and desktop apps because we started from scratch and learned all the tools, libraries and mechanisms we need within two days.

What we learned

Android development, Web crawler, Python GUI, teamwork...

What's next for Keywords Alert

Web server for offline search, more flexible search options and iOS version.

Share this project:

Updates