Description as a Tweet:

Quick little bot that runs on a MacOS based system and spams your friend of choice with the top song of any artist you'd like. Serves them right for not enjoying your favorite artist. Simply tell the program any artist name, and sit back and watch as they end up blocking you.

Inspiration:

Truth is, I had a much more serious idea along with my team - something along the lines of a mental health monitoring system powered by Google Cloud's Vision API and Language API. But due to some circumstances they had to leave and I had a few hours, so I just thought "hey, why not prank some people I know and make sure I lose a couple of friends today?" Also, a friend of mine Olivia hates Cheerleader by OMI, so I'm going to change that today.

What it does:

It does 2 main things:
1. It scrapes lyrics of the top song of your chosen artist
2. It then sends each word in the lyrics to an unfortunate friend

How we built it:

I built it primarily using Python and AppleScript. To first recover information on the given artist, I made use of the Genius API which then gave me a URL for the top song. Using Beautiful Soup, I then scraped the lyrics off of that URL. Now this is when the AppleScript comes in play. This tool allowed me to work with native apps such as iMessage, and this is exactly what I did as I used a script to send each and every word from the lyrics to a phone number of my choice.

Technologies we used:

• Python
• Misc

Challenges we ran into:

This was my first time web scraping. Learning how to use Beautiful Soup and extract data from websites using their HTML tags and classes was quite new, and hence quite challenging for me. I ran into a ton of bugs which often had me retrieving the wrong data, sometimes incomplete data, and sometimes even no data. Another challenge was AppleScript. I honestly didn't know that existed until I did some research on how to actually automate sending messages using iMessage.

Accomplishments we're proud of:

I got the whole program to work in a matter of hours. I learnt a bunch of new tools, and in the end had a ton of fun making this project.

What we've learned:

Web scraping, Apple scripting

What's next:

Would probably want to get rid of the terminal frontend and probably have set up a nice looking frontend using Flask, Django.
Also would want to be able to search songs instead of artists

Built with:

Python, AppleScript, Genius API

Prizes we're going for:

• Best Documentation
• Best Web Hack
• Funniest Hack
• Best Mobile Hack
• Best Beginner Software Hack
• Best Beginner Web Hack

Shashank Lal

Table TBD