Show HN: Dead simple Hacker News reader for iOS(brushedtype.co) |
Show HN: Dead simple Hacker News reader for iOS(brushedtype.co) |
My app MiniHack dose all.
Nested comments, collapsible comment thread, login to upvote, reply to comment, one tap to open story or comments. Share to Pocket, Instapaper, Pinboard, Evernote, etc. Search hacker news, view the best of pages, ask, new, jobs. Instapaper and Readability mobilizer support, and more.
And I am working on the new iOS 7 update right now, including UI redesign, a new slick dark theme, better sharing (pinboard tags, evernote auto complete), and more.
https://itunes.apple.com/hk/app/minihack-for-hacker-news/id6...
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/news-yc/id592893508?mt=8
EDIT: All of the production code is available on Github as well.
The big feature I want is I want a way to see what I've already read. I think this is the first app (other than mine) that I know does this.
Haven't played around long but I like you can collapse and expand comments. Is there a way to default them all to be expanded?
EDIT: You need a way to refresh comments.
@Replies: I'm glad you guys like it. Looks like I'll renew my Developer Program membership then. It's due in less than a week.
If you can comment on this, it should be interesting. I really wish you showed more of the functionality of the app though.
http://hn.premii.com is absolutely mind blowing — it's lightweight, web based and super fast.
The functionality of Hack Later is its speed and deep read later (currently Pocket only) integration. Comments are in the works, too! Also, I'm probably biased but I think it's pretty good looking :)
When you click a link from one of the app's inbuilt views to the story page or the Hacker News comment thread, you don't have a "back" button, and I can't find any way other than force-quit-and-restart to get out of it.
(It'd also be nice if, at least on iPhone, the app could produce the same effect as <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width" /> when viewing external pages; as it is now, such viewing involves lots of tiny text and scrolling, without the Safari reader interface available to mitigate.)
Nice app; I look forward to using it, once the navigation's fixed.
I ended up buying it since I'm still looking for a good HN reader out there that does all of: indenting comment threads, gives you the choice of browsing directly to the story without going through comments, and displaying key story information beside the story, such as the number of votes.
Firstly, thanks for buying the app! I wasn't personally expecting this much response, it was meant to be a read-only app, but I personally ended up missing comments as well. I understand your concern. I've good news though : we started the work on implementing comments :)
However, I would echo the need for comment support.
Check out how http://hn.premii.com/ does comments, I find that quite readable compared to news:yc.
The ability to log in and reply to comments would round out the use case that I used to use other apps for.
Or app store: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hacker-news-yc/id713733435?l...
The major pain point with the current viewer I use is difficult-to-read comment threads. I can't see any screenshots of comment threads in your app. Are they collapsible? Is the hierarchy clear?
Can you post comments yourself in-app? I remember seeing another app at the same price point that did that.
Good luck anyway!
The app doesn't support comments for now, but we're working on implementing it. I wasn't personally expecting this much response, it was meant to be a read-only, simple app but I ended up missing comments in my own personal usage too. Don't worry, they're in the works! :)
Sorry for the confusion! If you don't want to wait, news:yc (http://newsyc.me/) is an awesome app that does comments already!
Thanks for the awesome response! The most requested feature is comments by far, totally understand it. Comments are a planned feature, and we intend to implement them as soon as we can. For now though the app is focused deeply on saving posts and links, so Hack Later still might be worth checking out, if you haven't already.
Also, promo codes are fun.
W4LEYM7ENYLN AL43JW7JWJXY 6NM77R6X3KLF KTXTY46XRM7R 4Y63MWJMAMNT
Enjoy!
You wouldn't have got me otherwise - I'll be honest, my thought pattern lies in the _davidsmith camp, and when I saw your app was £1.49 (more than £0), I moved my attention on.
But this app doesn't show any comments yet so its still got some ways to go.
It uses new APIs in iOS 7 to preload the front page before you open it.
I tried out your app, looks awesome — congrats! Background refresh and comments are planned for Hack Later. Feature request for Pivit : I'd love if the web view had some controls (back, forward, refresh etc.) and the comments had some contrast, it's really hard to focus to a thread.
And yes, this is a shameless plug.
With Pivit, since it's such a compact fetch, it'll happen more frequently than if you were, for instance, downloading photos. I check HN a lot, so for me, the app is always up to date. It does take a bit of learning time for the OS to know your patterns, but it is well worth it--it's really a great new API.
A couple of suggestions:
- Comments - Instapaper or similar
Comments are definitely something planned.
Hacker News for Windows Phone: http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/app/hacker-news/a527...
Looks great!!
Though I dislike the comment tiering (non-indentation / hard to track).
Any suggestions for iPhone?
On Android, Hacker News 2 has been wonkey with loading comments, but I love the comment layout.
Built by Matt Bishop: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=airlocksoftware
Load it up, blank screen.
Pull to refresh, says 'Error Loading'.
Try again, and then just crashes.
Have some respect for your customers and test properly before you release. What a waste of 1.99
Comments are planned though!
Do any of them do that?
A few other thoughts:
* Profile > Edit needs a cancel button. The only way to get out is to re-enter your username. Or maybe just make it go back to the old value if you enter blank.
* Long usernames tend to make the description line run off the screen and end with "...", which is a bit messy. Maybe a smarter truncation algorithm?
* Swiping left to right on a story seems to work inconsistently, but I'm not sure why.
* The comment view is just about perfect.
I often find I choose to ignore certain posts but they often stick around so I reread the headlines. Pivit shows an orange indicator on brand new posts.
Re comments, I could add a feature to expand all if I get enough requests, but after some use I've found this to be optimal.