newsflash

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  Example headline

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  Example summary

Inspiration

We wanted to make an app that exposes readers to small, condensed forms of something and allowed them to look into it more if they wished - similar to Tinder. When thinking of what to make this a “tinder for”, we thought that doing it for facts or news would be very cool since it would help us become more informed. It also reminded us of how when we read reddit.com, we would every once in a while find a small tidbit of info and start wanting to look into it. Newsflash does the same thing where you get a small amount of information and easy access to more if you wish.

What it does

Newsflash is an Android app that informs users about news in a subject of their choice. It gives the user a headline to which a user can either choose to read more about or read a different headline. If the user elects to read more about a headline, they are given a short summary of the article and links to the original article and relevant keywords that may aid in their understanding of the news article.

How we built it

Newsflash obtains the news headlines and articles from newsapi, an API for accessing current news from a variety of different sources. Using the search function, the user can narrow these possible articles headlines that they will see. To generate the summary, an API request is made to aylien, a tool that generates a summary of an article given the link to the article. This summary is generated using machine learning and natural language processing.The program also generates relevant keywords, which are given to the user as links to a encyclopedia entries about these keywords.

Challenges we ran into

Learning how to make the simple and clean layouts we wanted in XML in Android Studio was very tedious especially since we had little experience working with building Android Studio apps. Learning how to optimize and make API calls in Java was also a challenge, especially since we were more accustomed to using Python and had to convert our Python code to Java for Android studio.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud we learned how to create a mostly-nice looking android app for the first time and learned how to do API calls in Java, especially since we were only used to doing it in Python. We are happy with our product and idea.

What we learned

We learned a lot about using Android Studio and working with the many different UI/UX elements involved with developing an Android app.

What's next for newsflash

There are a lot of more features we want to add and improvements on the UI. We want to improve how the app provides user context behind articles in the key terms searcher and also possibly by adding an algorithm that would search for related past articles. Allowing the user to edit certain settings for the UI like adding a dark/light mode is also important to us as we want users to feel as comfortable as possible while reading. Improving the save article function to store and share article links would help keep users coming back.

Built With

• android-studio
• java