This document describes NewsSpeak, an Android app that provides personalized news content aggregation. It summarizes that NewsSpeak offers consolidated access to multiple news sources, reads articles aloud, and has a clean text-only viewing mode. It utilizes technologies like Google AppEngine for backend processing of feeds and text extraction. The document discusses challenges like feed parsing and text extraction that were addressed in developing NewsSpeak, and how tools like AsyncTask, services and notifications were used to build the app experience.

1. NewsSpeak
Vamsi Narla

2. About NewsSpeak
 Android app
 Get latest news and blog updates
 It’snot just another
✘ feed reader
✘ news app

3. The market out there
Official apps Aggregators
 One source  Good examples
 New York Times  Pulse
 WSJ  World newspapers
 Yonhap news  USP
 Fox News  UI
 Toomany apps to  Extensive library
install  One umbrella app

4. The idea behind NewsSpeak
 Most feed readers are not “smart”
 They just direct to webpages
 Users’ inertia against setting up feeds
 and sign ups
 Mobilitymeans users will like to consume
content differently, while
 Working out
 Commuting

5. What NewsSpeak offers ?
✔ One app several news sources
✔ Reads out news articles
✔ Text only mode for better reading experience
✔ Instant news search
✔ Quick and responsive customer service (Yep,
that’s me) 

6. How NewsSpeak stacks up ?
NewsSpeak XYZ
Fast text only
view
Brand!
Locale
Quick news User base
search
UI (?)
s
Read out article

7. The difficult parts
 Feed parsing
 Text extraction
 Reading out articles
 Preparing a library

8. Problem solved!

9. Putting AppEngine to good use
Library Text
creation extraction
Feed
Searches
parsing

10. Gaining Insight
 Google analytics for Android
 Add more news providers
 Support new languages

11. Developing on Android - UI
 Layouts
 Containers for views
 Views
 UI widgets

12. Developing on Android - UI
Power off button so you
don’t use task killer
Relative layout
EditText
LinearLayout within the
parent RelativeLayout

13. Developing on Android - UI
Custom ProgessDialog

14. Developing on Android - UI
Tab activity
Listview

15. Developing on Android - UI
Drag and drop listview
(rearrange items so that
you can get to your
favorite sources faster)
Toast (notify short
messages)

16. Developing on Android - UI
Listview again!
RelativeLayout
within each item
Hidden layout pops out
when you click on the
article.
SlidingDrawer to show
available categories. Saves
valuable screen area.

17. Developing on Android - UI
Flip between
articles (animates
using ViewFlipper)
Webview showing article
content, e-book experience
Share article

18. Developing on Android – behind the
scenes
 Activity
 Each screen is one typically
 Services
 Run in background
 Remote & Local
 AsyncTask
 Easiest way to setup and run intensive tasks not on
UI thread
 Downloads
 Notifications

19. Developing on Android - Tools
 UI
 layoutopt
 Hierarchy viewer
 monkey
 Debugging
 DDMS
 logcat
 adb

20. Thanks