Sportssync Raycast Extension

Overview

Sportssync is a raycast extension that keeps you updated with live scores, standings, articles, injuries, and transactions across your favorite sports leagues. With dynamic updates, you can stay in the loop without interrupting your workflow.

Goals and Motivation

The goal of Raycast has always been to create seamless workflows that eliminate the friction between tasks, allowing users to stay focused. A sports extension has been long requested, something to provide an easy way to stay up to date with scores, news, standings, and relevant information across many sports through just the Raycast search bar.

Sportssync delivers this solution, bridging the gap between sports and productivity. Using the ESPN Sports API, I built an extension that would deliver easy access to live scores, standings, and news, all without interrupting your work.

Commands

• Scores and Schedule: Dynamically view live scores, game times, and completed scores (updates dynamically based on the game state). Supports scores from the past 3 days, games for the next 5 days, and today’s games.
• Standings Command: View team standings and in-depth stats (differs based on the league)
• Tracker Command: View articles, injuries, and transactions (differs based on the league).
• Favorite Team Dashboard: One command to view completed games, scheduled games, team information, team standings position, injuries, transactions, and injuries (differs based on league, also requires a favorite league, sport, and team for setup).
• Live Scores Menubar: View Live Scores, Game Times, and Completed Scores directly from your menubar. (Requires a favorite league and sport for setup)

Supported Leagues

Leagues that are fully supported feature the following: a scores and schedule, standings, and news command

• NHL (Fully supported)
• NBA (Fully Supported)
• WNBA (Fully Supported)
• Men’s College Basketball (Only scores and news)
• Women’s College Basketball (Only scores and news)
• NFL (Fully Supported)
• College Football (Men’s) - (Only scores and news)
• MLB (Fully Supported)
• F1 (Only scores, standings and news)
• EPL (English Premier League) - (Only scores, standings and news)
• UEFA (Champions League) - (Only scores, standings and news)
• SLL (LALIGA) - (Only scores, standings and news)
• GER (German Bundesliga) - (Only scores, standings and news)
• ITA (Italian Serie A) - (Only scores, standings and news)

Roadmap

• Live Scores Command (Menubar): View live scores and upcoming games, and click on games to set them as the menu bar title, allowing users to view scores with automatic refreshes.
• Tracker Command: A command to view injuries and transactions
• Past Scores Command: A separate command (or something integrated into the scores and schedules command) to allow users to view scores for previous games (up to a few days)
• Favorite Team Command: A single command to follow a specific team
• Roster View for Standings Command
• Player Profiles from Roster View
• Universal Player Search Command
• Article Viewer for Tracker Command (Read Articles directly in Raycast)
• Add to Calendar Action for games
• Current Leagues Planned: UFC, Boxing, WWE, Nascar
• Additional Leagues: Please request any leagues that you’d like me to add support for, and I’ll look into seeing what I can do.

In-depth stats, for the scores and schedule command:

• Play by Play Tracker: A menu to view play-by-play events during live games.
• Team Stats and Team Matchups: A separate menu similar to the play-by-play tracker, to view individual team stats, leaders, and the season series for upcoming games.
• Final Team Stats: Another separate menu to view the final team stats after a game has been completed, including team leaders, player stats, and overall team stats.

Links

• Github Repository
• Raycast Store

Tech Stack Used

• Typescript
• React
• Raycast API

Challenges and Solutions

Due to the nature of this project (being open source, and non profit), I couldn’t justify paying for a sports API. I decided to do explore the free options available, and I eventually came across a few options. I found a proprietary API for both the MLB and NHL, that were free, and very in depth. The issue that arose was: at the heart of the extension is the leagues, and I wanted to make sure that all major sports leagues are supported.

If I chose to use a proprietary API, I would essentially be creating an extension for only one league, contradicting the goal of this extension. Since I wasn’t able to find a free API for many of the other major leagues, which would essentially bring my project to a halt, I looked for more options.

Thankfully, I came across some well documented ESPN API endpoints that were free, with no limits for requests. Thus, I ended up choosing the ESPN API, it offered a similar JSON response for each league and a simple way to scale out each command for every league.

Conclusion

This project has been an invaluable learning experience. Every challenge and every experience strengthened my problem solving skills and introduced me to new concepts and technologies. Building this project with the goal of real world use and implications, has been incredibly rewarding, and I’m excited iterate further upon this concept in the future, providing an unrivaled sports experience for Raycast.