In February 2016, two friends (Pedro Paredes and “Michel” Duarte) and I took part in a hackathon held in our hometown — Coimbra, Portugal. It’s called “Shift APPens” and participants are allowed to build both apps and games in only 48 hours. If you'd like to read more about how it works, feel free to. In short words though, it is a simple application that lets users browse through news for a given location and range in time.

Since we only had two days to work on both the backend and design, the interface isn't as polished as it ought to be. However, certain aspects of it turned out to be key to eventually winning the hackathon.

We thought it’d be cool if we presented the results in the form of a newspaper cover, to give the users the feeling of going back in time while reading the news. In fact, we even implemented three different newspaper layouts to match the era of their time range. I think this worked out pretty well, as the people who tried it out really liked it.

Secondly, we also put a lot of focus on the interface for selecting the query to search for, and I implemented a very fancy map with zoom animations and country/continent selection based on DataMaps. At the top, you can find a slider which lets you choose the time range for the search, based on noUiSlider. The interesting feature about the slider is that the scale is non-linear, meaning that it is easier to select more accurate intervals for 2016 or the 20th century.