Show HN: I made Linkpack, a filesystem-based link organizer for iOS | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I made Linkpack, a filesystem-based link organizer for iOS

linkpack.io

42 pointsstelabouras38 comments

I like that the data is stored on dropbox, so that I dont have to trust even more people with my surfing data (instapaper/pocket).

Hmm, no app for the iPad makes this less usable for me as I do most of my reading on my iPad mini.

That's just the first release of Linkpack :) There are plans for a universal app in a future update that will support all iOS devices.

Any plans for offline reading?

Yep, offline support is already on the roadmap :)

That is great to hear, I'll definitely give it a spin.

Great!

You trust Dropbox?

As much as anyone else. I think the point is you don't need yet another provider, since I already have a dropbox account.

Not incredibly much but if I already use them for files this is but a addition and not adding another untrusted party.

I appreciate the straightforward and simple website that gets right to the point.

The website is beautiful and performant (Safari on iPhone 6+). Great job. I also love this idea. I was looking for something just like it.

EDIT:

https://www.linkpack.io/terms/

I would love to see an inplementation of this from an org with a more DuckDuckGo-like philosophy. Where personal and tracking information is simply not collected.

I emailed them about this, they claim its a error in the privacy policy and will update it. They say it is referring to the case if you share your reading list publicly.

Yep, it's just not being explained enough in our Privacy Policy. We will change that.

Linkpack does not collect all of your links and sends them to our servers. Only after tapping the share button in a particular folder, and only then, it makes a request to Dropbox API to collect just the links of this particular folder, in order to generate the page that you can share with your friends.

What are your plans to support other browsers? I would definitely jump ship from Pocket if I had either a bookmarklet or a Safari extension; the notion of dragging the link to a Dropbox folder feels a little too clunky.

We plan to create a Safari extension as soon as possible and a Firefox one just after that. The first release of Linkpack was just an MVP, so we will definitely add support for more browsers as we continue the development!

Fantastic, I'll keep an eye out for when that happens. Congratulations on shipping!

Thanks! :)

Funny, I thought someone was posting one of my undocumented projects here. http://linkpackets.com - semi sort of related. But it's an easy way(email tokens only) for me to keep track of a bundle of links between the office and home, and also link groups of them to other people. Maybe this is what I need instead!

Example, my RethinkDB packet.

http://linkpackets.com/p/41Cqbtimx

This looks great. Any plans to support (or at least provide an option for) using Safari view controller? Maybe even with reader mode as a default option (Tweetbot does this) which would probably eliminate the need for Readability.

Safari view controller was released as an API when we were further down in the development of Linkpack. That said, while Safari VC has some handy features like the reader mode, it does not let us do stuff like tracking the reading progress or customizing the look of it to match the look and feel of the Linkpack app. We do keep an eye on this API though.

Congrats on shipping!

How are you planning to monetize and keep it going long-term?

Thanks!

Right now there a $1.99 IAP that enables extra functionality such as Reading Progress, Narration and more but -as we are in a really early stage- this might change in the future, depending on the features that will be implemented.

Please don't name things like this. The Linpack library and associated benchmark is an old and well known piece of software.

What is the reason for iOS8 as the minimum requirement? Still on iOS7 here but I'd love to use the app.

Linkpack makes use of some iOS8 APIs (it has a Share Extension, it uses the UIVibrancyEffect and UISearchController etc) that would increase the development time if we decided to support older versions. I understand the frustration but this was a decision we had to make in order to speed up the development. Plus iOS8+9 now make up the 94% of the install base according to Apple: https://developer.apple.com/support/app-store/.

I understand. Too bad for me.

Why only Dropbox and no iCloud..?

We do plan to add more cloud providers in the future. We started with Dropbox as this was something that we have been already using in our daily routines, plus it's the most widely used.

I'd use it with Google Drive, do you have a newsletter to keep folks updated?

Yep, here's a direct link to our newsletter form: http://eepurl.com/bCVL2v

I will update the website soon to add a form for the newsletter there as well.

I only get an empty red page.

The page is warped in after you get to the page. Your browser must be having issues with the javascript. I could do without the fancy effects as well.

Uhm that's weird, what browser are you using?

Firefox with javascript disabled.

The disabled javascript is the cause of the issue here. The page waits till all the images are loaded and then begins the initial animation. I will need to find a workaround for people who have JS disabled. Out of curiosity though, why is Javascript disabled in your browser? :)

Mainly because of speed issues. I often have 100+ tabs open and if every site loads a gazillion scripts, Firefox becomes unresponsive.

So how do you use any of those sites without the scripts working?

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