HNExtended
The app I plan to make is an extension of my HW3 app.
My last app scraped the HTML of news.ycombinator.com and saved the results into the phone. Every time the app was reloaded, the app would show the biggest changers (links that got the most points).
I’d like to pull this database like feature off into an online database that would automatically scrape the html every 10 minutes and do all the biggest changer/data storing over there. Then, on the phone, I’d like to have multiple screens: a list of all the current, all the new, all the biggest changers. Each of these would be on a separate page. The tough part about this is going to be getting a scrollview on the same screen as a gesture listener. I tried doing this in HW3 and it proved difficult so I left it for a future experiment.
I’d also like a little button on the bottom right that can be clicked to bring up a search box to look through links. This is mainly a UI feature and shouldn’t be hard to implement in the database.
I’d also like to have more information per link and a prettier interface. For more information, maybe click on the adapterview item and then it’ll take you to a detailed link page with the first few comments (or a link to the comments) and maybe a graph showing how fast the link is gaining points (per every 10 minutes).
The last thing I’d like to implement is a pretty UI. The backend is going to be difficult and I’d like to focus on that first, but a nice UI is always… nice.
The biggest problem I have is using an online database… I don’t know where I’d get this. I was hoping to use some school servers but who knows. Maybe I’ll have to come up with a different idea.
But if I do get the online database I think this could be a complicated yet cool project that could be extended to other sites that just list news articles.