HN now mostly readable on mobile | Hacker News Reader

HN now mostly readable on mobile

news.ycombinator.com

90 pointsdjanowski46 comments

The comments don't render correctly on FF on Android. They all render one after another and it's impossible to tell which comments are replies and which aren't. :(

Same problem here. You can see the same effect on desktop FF by narrowing your window.

been like this for a week maybe. I thought this was going to be them fixing it.

'pparently not

HN renders pretty good on Ubuntu Phone

Same here. I've been using a desktop user-agent to get rid of this.

I actually find myself reading the site considerably less because of this, I'm sure I'm not the only one. Please let me set a cookie to keep the desktop version!!

If using mobile Firefox on Android, there's "request desktop version" on the menu pulldown.

Yes, that's totally broken. Sorry; we'll fix it.

Can you also switch from the current indentation layout (via images in a table) to a div-based layout where all subcomments are inside the element of the parent comment?

Like, currently it’s

    <tr><td><img width="40"></td><td>Text1</td></tr>
    <tr><td><img width="60"></td><td>Text2</td></tr>

After it would be

    <li class="comment">
      <p>Text1</p>
      <ul class="subcomments">
        <li class="comment>
          <p>Text2</p>
        </li>
      </ul>
    </li>

I wouldn't mind HN upping the indention when I have an iPhone 6+ in landscape mode. Its kind of hard to tell parents and children.

This is the only challenge I have with it as well, otherwise it's a fantastic experience.

I have a similar issue on my Nexus 6 in portrait mode.

A way to collapse replies would also be appreciated. Sometimes I just want to read the top-level comments and scrolling through dozens of replies to find the next topic of discussion can be frustrating.

I'd like to second this one. Sometimes the top comment ends up being one of those that spawns a gigantic and completely unproductive conversation, and it would be nice to be able to move past it easily.

I've been using this minimal extension for a while solely for that: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-collap...

It's definitively something that should be built in though.

That looks pretty good. Thanks for the link. Unfortunately it doesn't help for iPhone reading, though. Stupid Apple....

For desktop at least, I use HN Special which includes this feature.

Absolutely. Everyone replies to the first comment, and it takes forever to get down to later/lower conversations.

iPhone 6 in portrait, same issue. Almost impossible to tell them apart without paying incredibly close attention.

I wonder if they've tried keeping all comments at the same width, while indenting children by a visible amount? That is:

     |---screen---|
      |-comment--|
       |--reply---|
        |--reply---|

That way you'd have to scroll down+right to follow a thread, but at least you could tell the difference between children and siblings, and never get super-narrow posts deep in a thread.

Some deeply nested conversations get the formatting hammer after a certain depth. A gentle slide to the right suddenly becomes 2" or more, with text jammed into half an inch of screen width.

Now if I only can stop fat-fingering down all the great posts.

Yep - it would also be great if HN provided an indicator of which way you voted. As it stands, I'd say I probably get it right about 75% of the time, but who knows? It's impossible to tell if you've upvoted or downvoted a comment still; and especially on mobile, I bet I get it wrong pretty often.

How long do you have to be on the site or how much karma do you need in order to downvote?

About 500 karma to be able to downvote comment, I believe (you can't down vote submission).

It has been suggested many time before to move the up and down arrows apart on mobile - something like

^ —- greatposter —- v

The one good that come from the current system is it helps you avoid taking a down vote personally since it could always be a fat-fingered up vote.

You're on iPhone aren't you. Having used both iPhone and Android for some time now I think its crazy how much more accurate Android is with pointing at small links on-screen. And in the rare instance it's not confident about what you meant to push, it will zoom in a bubble and ask you to click again (confirm), where the iPhone will just not do anything.

Yes an iPhone - it is so easy to down vote someone by accident that I tend not to vote when on the iPhone.

Can the upvote and downvote triangular arrows be given more separation? On my Firefox Mobile, they appear together vertically close together and I fear I may tap on the wrong one.

Whooooooo! Thank you dang and team. I have been very critical of the site's mobile unfriendliness in the past. Now I can use this as an example of a small change that makes a big difference. Certainly better late than never. You have probably saved me thousands over the lifetime in new glasses and contacts.

On Windows Phone (I know, fringe audience, but I love it), I need to slightly adjust the zoom level on the comments view pages. The viewport is slightly narrower than the page's content, by about 15%.

But otherwise, and even with that small matter, it's a change that makes mobile use easier. Reading has always been fairly easy on mobile in my opinion, but clicking the right thing (e.g., the comments links) required either zooming or very careful aim. It's nice to not have that challenge any more.

I will echo the request for a bit more indentation for child comments. But I also understand the hesitation to add too much indentation given the narrow viewport.

On a Lumia 920 right now, and it looks fine to me.

Lumia 640, looks fine for me too.

Doesn't work on my tablet, I get the desktop website with tiny letters. If I zoom in, I have to scroll horizontally to read the comments, which is a pain in the butt.

I'm surprised this wasn't announced officially by dang. I spent some time the other day searching for the official announcement of HN's new responsive design, and just figured I must've missed it.

There was an official thread a week ago, asking for feedback (which was mostly positive): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10489499

Ah, thanks! That makes more sense.

Seems like the last week or so the comment indentation has been worse on Android with Chrome on a 7" tablet. It used to be a larger indent. Now I can't tell who's replying to what without thinking about it.

Unfortunately, it seems that the it broke the iOS client, Akepa . I'm sure other clients are also affected.

They've been telling client developers that they should move from screen-scraping to using the API (https://github.com/HackerNews/API) for a while now. I don't know if that's the problem with this specific client, but you may want to check with the developers and see if it is, and if so, what their ETA is for getting onto the API.

The issue with the current API is that it's read-only, so clients can't completely migrate to it. Using a combination of the API for reads and scraping for checking responses to writes makes things a bit difficult.

I just found this out by trying the site in mobile Chrome for the first time in months. Pleasant surprise!

Welcome to 2013, HN!

Awesome, thank you,

And now we get massive text. Responsive

Thank you

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