Last Week, I started a project Crypto News App
The aim of the application is to fetch news feed from preferred blogs and display on the application. it is structured in such a way that you can scroll through them like you would do on your social media timeline. It also leverages you the ability to read any of these news, right there on the app without having to open another browser application.
I have been working on it since then, and there have been some good updates - Both bug fixes and New features.
If you would rather just test the new update and not bother about the technical explanations, download the Android apk - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1stZGDHcR2Xmp1szvjtwDFjkLEsgaaFg7/view?usp=sharing
Something Like this
<p>USI-Tech, a bitcoin mining company based out of the United Arab Emirates, has vowed to reopen its doors to North American users, according to an announcement sent out to participants via its website: The company’s lawyers acknowledge having regulatory issues in Texas, Washington, Minnesota and Hawaii do to the compensation structure and marketing tactics of</p>\n
In the previous version, I inputted this excerpt into a HtmlWebViewSource
<WebView>
<WebView.Source>
<HtmlWebViewSource Html="{Binding Excerpt, StringFormat='{0} ...'}" />
</WebView.Source>
</WebView>
The problem with this approach is that the renderer had to process the encoded string first, before processing it to a html format. This caused a considerable time lag.
So what I did in this new version was to strip the string of the html tags, at the point of fetching, using regular expression
blogPost.Excerpt = Regex.Replace(tempExcerpt, @"<[^>]*(>|$)| ||»|«|’", string.Empty).Trim();
and thereafter process it as a normal Xaml Label.
<Label Text="{Binding Excerpt, StringFormat='{0} ...'}" TextColor="Black" FontSize="Medium"/>
This improved the responsiveness and load time immensely.
https://github.com/Johnesan/CryptoNews/blob/master/CryptoNews/CryptoNews/Services/PostsRepository.cs
@emmexdee in this postI connected with him, and he gave me the go ahead to use the designs. I added a splashscreen for the application with one of his banner designs.
https://github.com/Johnesan/CryptoNews/blob/master/CryptoNews/CryptoNews.Android/SplashActivity.cs
However, I got feedback from some non-technical folks that it was a Herculean task for them. So in this update, I automated the process. I added a "test button" which allowed users to input their website url and have the application automatically check if it meets the requirements before saving.
Here's how I did it:
I get the url they type into the entry and then append the wordpress API extension to it, then make a Http request to it and check if it returns a "success" status code.
https://github.com/Johnesan/CryptoNews/blob/master/CryptoNews/CryptoNews/Views/EditBlogWebsite.xaml.cs
private async void TestButtonClicked(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
.
.
.
HttpClient httpClient = new HttpClient();
httpClient.BaseAddress = new Uri(url);
httpClient.DefaultRequestHeaders.Accept.Clear();
httpClient.DefaultRequestHeaders.Accept.Add(new MediaTypeWithQualityHeaderValue("application/json"));
var response = await httpClient.GetAsync("/wp-json/wp/v2/posts?_embed");
if (response.IsSuccessStatusCode)
{
await DisplayAlert("Successful", "This Website has been tested and it meets the requirements to fetch its blog feed. You can now save it", "Ok");
SaveButton.IsEnabled = true;
.
.
.
}
else
{
await DisplayAlert("Failed", "This Website does not meet the requirements so this application cannot fetch its feed.", "Ok");
.
.
.
}
}
I have ignored unrelated code in this block, just to show the exact code that performs this check
I added a new class to handle the calculation of the DateTime property relative to the current time. So posts now have "just now", "25mins ago", "3 hours ago", etc... instead of "31/01/2018" all through.
Previous version vs New update
Here is the class that performs that https://github.com/Johnesan/CryptoNews/blob/master/CryptoNews/CryptoNews/Services/PrettyDate.cs
To make your contributions, the github link again is https://github.com/Johnesan/CryptoNews
You could get in touch with me, as regards any technical comments, questions or contributions you have concerning the project- [email protected]