Meanwhile – Your week in the news

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  Confirmation

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  Cartoonify yourself! You can pick from four different AI comic strip styles.

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  The main landing page for a group's paper

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  Birthday celebrations and hororscopes

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  A look at a lead cover article

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  The comic strip page (The Funnies!(

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  Getting invited to a paper

Meanwhile is a weekly newspaper for a small group of friends. Each person writes a few notes about their week. Those notes turn into short stories and a four-panel comic, with each friend drawn as a cartoon of themselves. The paper also has the week's weather, birthdays, and horoscopes. When the week is ready, everyone can read it and react with a laugh, an "aww," or a cheer. Old issues can be kept.

What inspired us

Group chats are where friends tell each other what happened, and then it all scrolls away. We wanted that same stuff to land somewhere you could hold onto: a paper that comes out once a week, looks like a Sunday funny, and is only for the people in it. The comic is the part that makes an ordinary week feel like it happened to characters you know.

How we built it

We made the paper as an app you can open on your phone. You sign in, add your name and city, and pick how your cartoon should look. You can start a paper or join a friend's with a code. During the week you jot down what happened. The app turns those notes into the stories and the comic strip. The front page, the comics, and the stars page are separate sections, like a real paper, and you turn from one to the next.

What we learned

The fun of it is in the ordinary details. A friend's week does not need to be dramatic to belong in the paper. A haircut, a bad lunch, or a dog at the park is enough, as long as it is theirs and the drawing looks like them.

Challenges

The writing and drawing did not always come back. When that happened, we used a simple stand-in instead, so the page would still finish. The app does not sit there loading, and it does not stop on an error. You can still read the paper and change anything that looks off.

Built With

• css
• html
• metamuse
• react-native
• serpapi
• typescript
• vite