FIRST HAND NEWS

Contributions Meenakshi Lakshmikanthan

Abirami Mangai Siu Lun Hong

Welcome to the First Hand News User Manual. In this document you will find a description of our application along with instructions on how to navigate through our website.

First Hand News is a comprehensive news aggregating website, which would collect news from various news sources along with relevant media information like pictures, videos, opinions and blog comments, so it will be a one stop place for the user to get his or her daily news.

Current news is collected from news sources and displayed in categories like Top Stories, U.S News, Sports News and Business News etc.,. The application also provides further links to share the news articles like adding it to del.icio.us, Digg, Stumble upon, Share on Facebook and Email a friend etc., .

This application was developed as a class project for EEL 5881 "Software Engineering I" during the Spring Semester of 2009 at the University of Central Florida under the direction of Dr Damla Turgut and our application client Jimmy Secretan.

User requirement:

• Personal Computer • Internet Web Browser- IE or Firefox. • Internet Connection • There is no login or authentication required for our website, and can be used by

anyone

To get started, the user should visit our website at:

http://aspspider.info/FirstHandNewsDemo

The home page lists the latest and current news headlines. The user can view the headlines under several categories, by clicking on the tabs. The user have to click on the Find Icon(or Zoom Icon) to view more media information like pictures, videos, blog comments, twitter posts about a particular news item.

Home Page Components:

The home page has several sections, let us view each one of them in detail.

1. Option to filter news stories by it’s published time: By default news articles from the last 24 hours are displayed. Using this combo box, the user can choose to view only the news articles published within the last couple of hours or so.

Figure a. Displaying the news articles published within last 5 hours

2. Tabs to view different news categories: First Hand News displays news articles in the following 5 categories:

1. Top Stories

2. World News

3. US News

4. Sports News

5. Business News

User can click on any tab to see news articles within that category.

Figure b – Displaying News articles related to Business in the Business Tab

3. News article: A brief summary about the news article is displayed here. More information about the news article is available in section 8.

4. News article Headline: Clicking on the headline takes the user to the actual news website where this news was published. To read the entire news article the user have to click on this link

5. News Summary: A brief summary of every news article is displayed below the Headlines. This summary helps the user to decide whether he or she is interested in the article and wants to continue more or not.

6. Sharing Options: The first hand news has several links to share a particular news item in different websites. The user can share or bookmark an article to Del.icio.us, Stumble Upon, Facebook, Digg or Email it to a friend.

Depending upon each social bookmarking site, the user may have to sign it to post the news article

7. Time published: All the news headlines are displayed chronologically, so the latest news is on top. The time just below the headlines shows how old the news article is. The time below the sharing options show the exact date and time the news article was published.

8. Media Information related to a news article: When the user clicks on the Find Icon, a pop-up opens and displays images, videos, blog comments, twitter feeds and book results(if any).

Figure C – Images, videos and other results on the Google tab

This pop-up page has three tabs. The Google tab, shows all relevant information from the Google media services. By default two most relevant images and videos are displayed. But the use can click on More results icon next to Image or Video section to view all the images/videos.

Within the Google tab there are five other tabs, which shows results from Blogs, general websites, News websites, related books and images from Google Images.

By default, under each tab 10 results are shown, but if the user scrolls down, he can click on More Results link at the bottom to view further results.

The twitter tab, shows all the tweets from Twitter related to that news item. User can reply to a tweet or click on the link to view Tweet within Twitter site.

Flickr tab, shows user uploaded pictures from the popular image sharing website Flickr. The user can click on any image to view it in full resolution.

Figure E – Images from Flickr related to the news article “Farm Fresh” movement a growing food trend