news-on-the-go

Inspiration

A lot of times, you'll want to read an article you've seen but you can't because you're in the car or doing something else. This solves that problem.

What it does

Reads the news

How we built it

We input articles from various news providers using News API, then use a text to speech library to convert the text articles to speech after parsing them. We developed it using react-native so it can be more easily cross-platform.

Challenges we ran into

It was a bit hard implementing the APIs and getting the app to read the body of the articles. The app is still having trouble with that but it loads all of the objects necessary.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're really excited just to have gotten the project running.

What we learned

We all learned a lot, but about varied subjects. We brought different skill sets with us in the beginning, so we came away with different learning. It was the first or second hackathon for all of us, so just being here is a learning experience.

What's next for news-on-the-go

The first thing is to make the API work more reliably. There isn't an API that gives the body of articles, so parsing the body of the text as a String from the URL is a challenge. We have the objects, now we have to load them to the app and read them, but all the independent pieces work together. There's also a bit more we can do to make the "look-and-feel" more polished.

Built With

• javascript
• react-native