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Landing page, where you can see all of the topics you subscribed to.
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Start page, where you get a brief introduction and put your name in if you'd like. You don't even have to create an unnecessary account!
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One of the infinitely many Interests that get continuously updated
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Read the news about literally anything and everything all the time! And have someone else give updates on it for you!
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Amherst News! It has a bell which means that if there's any surge in news from this source, Loop will notify you about any breakthroughs.
Inspiration
When my friends and I began giving up social media, we realized that we barely knew anything about current events. Not only that, but we quickly began losing track of new album, movie, and song releases. I didn't want to sacrifice my time by spending it on social media super often, but I wanted to find a way to stay up-to-date on what's happening in the world around me. So, I created Loop, an app that allows you to stay in the know about just about anything you are interested in. I valued simplicity and convenience over everything else, as I believe the internet and especially news sources are lacking in that category.
What it does
Loop at the fundamental level is a productivity tool that allows you to stay up-to-date on just about anything that is important to you in life. It allows you to create "Interests", which are nodes containing snippets of newsletters and their sources (It's more fun than it sounds, I promise). These interests summarize newsletters daily from all around the web. On top of that, these newsletters are updated every single day without you even having to do anything. For the last cherry on top, you can add push notifications to Interests for incase you are looking forward to new music, concert tickets, literally anything even beyond news that you would appreciate an extra brain for. By adding these notifications, Loop will immediately tell you if urgent news relevant to your interests has come out, and you will be the first to know about everything.
How we built it
I built this app completely in React Native.
Challenges we ran into
I have never completed an app before, and although I am comfortable with React.js, React Native definitely has it's own quirks I had to get used to. Also, even though I only used AI API for a small portion of this project to summarize and scrape web data, I was surprised with just how long it took for AI to understand what I believed were pretty simple tasks. It looks like I won't be unemployed after all!
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Just about everything to do with this app I am insanely proud of, and I'm excited to work on it after Hack UMass. My favorite thing about it has to be how deceptively simple it is, as you would never expect just how useful it can be for you behind the scenes. I am also super proud of how it looks, as I've always had trouble with art and I feel like I did a solid job in the mobile app department, especially the iOS aesthetic.
What we learned
I learned React Native! I also learned that I heavily underestimate how long something is going to take. I thought that I'd be able to get solid sleep this year, but there were just so many features I wanted to squeeze in!
What's next for Loop
I want to improve upon the push notifications, as they aren't as adaptive as I'd want them to be. I'd want to make a system where I am pretty confident that a new song, movie, or some other type of news is being released before pinging anyone interested. I also can't wait to just use Loop myself, as I made this app for an issue that I constantly have as someone who isn't in social media, and hates journalist subscription fees. So it will be so nice to have access to whatever I want easy peasy every single day!!
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