Morning Mosaic

Inspiration

All of our team members are first-year students at UNC with some, but not a lot, of coding background and experience. Therefore, our goal was to implement something that might be interesting to us, no matter the idea. We settled on using an API, as 3/4 of us had never used one before. The project inspiration came from one of our members who loves to scroll Google News every morning, so we thought to use the Newsapi.org API provided to deliver quick and easy news every morning.

What it does

Morning Mosaic pulls the top 6 articles different categories each day, each article from a different news source. Users have the choice of 5 different categories to read from.

How we built it

We used React Native as our UI, NewsAPI to pull most the 6 most popular news articles daily, and JS, HML, and CSS for form and functionality.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into trouble combining our API backend and UI frontend, and we were unfortunately unable to complete the product fully. However, we did create two separate products to display all the functionality. We created an HMTL webpage to show the functionality of the NewsAPI, and we also created a React Native app to show off the app's capabilities.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of being able to learn on our feet, troubleshoot our problems, and come up with solutions to tricky issues. Starting on Saturday, we first learned React Native at 11:30 a.m. through a workshop. With little experience besides creating a button or two, we delved into the development of our app and were able to successfully integrate functionality and style into the Morning Mosaic app. Most of us had also never used an API before, so being able to pull data from an API within an hour or two was awesome.

What we learned

We learned that slowly and carefully debugging and tracing our steps is the best way to solve our issues the quickest, as there were many times where silly mistakes took much longer to fix than needed, hampering our progress.