politiq

With the merging of social media and politics, it is hard to find a central source of news where there is more than just one side to the story. Politiq is democratizing politics.

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Inspiration

It's hard to find sources for politics with the increasing amount of media coverage in our everyday lives, and when we find a source it is biased either for or against the topic. We at politiq want to change that.

What it does

  • Gathers articles from various news sources
  • Gathers articles covering different topics
  • Allows users to save articles they like
  • Stay up to date on current events

How we built it

  • This app was designed fully using Figma and that design was created in Swift on iOS
  • The news API is from link and we are using their free to use developer version
  • After we had a design and source for articles we started creating the app with Flutter, which enables us to use one codebase for our app on both Android and iOS
  • We wrote an Http service in the flutter app that lets us easily interact with the News API
  • We then enabled user creation with Firebase which allowed us to provide users the ability to save articles to our Firebase Cloud Firestore
  • Once all of our backends were written out, we were tasked with taking the data and creating a unanimous object that was modular enough to be used throughout the whole app but not to complex to take a long time to develop
  • After creating the app we were left with testing and finding any holes where bugs were hiding in our code

Challenges we ran into

  • The Biggest we ran into was how the developer plan for the News API limits the amount of text that was transferred which takes a toll on our app
    • The plus side is that this is a hackathon and it's a very minuit issues
  • Some other challenges we faced were learning to integrate Firebase into iOS and also the best way to store and retrieve saved articles

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • We successfully pull news articles from the API and plug in the articles into our Flutter app so it looks how we had planned
  • We successfully are able to search for articles by a search bar
  • We are able to save articles and see them in our database and on the saved articles page
  • We are able to easily log in with the built-in Google Sign-in which turns a login form into a one-touch button

What we learned

  • We learned about efficient data structuring that allows us to easily acquire the data from the Cloud Firestore without making lots of comparisons
  • We also learned about how to make eloquent and simple UI that will enhance a user's experience when using the app

What's next for politiq

  • Use In-App Messaging to host forums for discussions
  • Use Cloud Messaging for push notifications for subscribed topics
  • Find/Create an API to search for Political Events like debates, etc.

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