Newsify

Inspiration

We were inspired by our own experiences constantly having to refresh our news apps in a desperate attempt to catch a speck of good news about the pandemic. Reading all these articles is time-consuming and overwhelming, and we really wanted an easier way of doing it.

What it does

Web app that allows you to enter the URL of a covid-19 related news article and receive a summary of its contents.

How we built it

Front end was build in Vue and connected to a python backend via the axios package. The url is passed to the backend as a string and then passed through the MeaningCloud natural language processing API.

Challenges we ran into

Hosting our app on our registered domain was difficult due to packages that were installed at the time of the virtual environment creation, which blocked some functionalities.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

None of us have ever completed a web app that can actually pass information between the front end and backend

What we learned

We learned that planning is very important, and we also learnt a myriad of different ways that requests and responses are handled by web apps. A sample of what one of these graphs would look like is posted below.

What's next for Newsify

A feature that uses the matlablib to plot real-time data about COVID-19 and use a data processing ML API to display predictions about the virus' projected spread.