Is this a better Hacknews UI? | Hacker News Reader

Is this a better Hacknews UI?

hn.premii.com

28 pointsausjke45 comments

No, at least not for me. The HN website as is loads very quickly as it's extremely lightweight. Although it doesn't have the greatest mobile UI, the website is at least functional on mobile thanks to a minimalist interface. On my phone, the linked UI took a few seconds to load the articles and scrolling was so jerky I quickly clicked back to here. I'm on a budget smartphone using (fast) Wi-Fi.

Try to do a search via the Mobile implementation. It's almost completely unusable.

No. The strengths of this UI is simple, good-looking organization that loads lightening-fast. Even works with NoScript easily while yours was a pile of links. If you want to benefit HN users, I'd suggest toying with variations of this exact design that try to solve problems people here gripe about.

Here's two with the first one probably very easy:

1. People accidentally downvote comments trying to upvote them. I can imagine no technical or UX excuse for this problem still existing. It's sooo easy to solve. Somewhere, someone is giving an order to keep it a problem probably for aesthetic reasons.

2. Comment nesting. A tricky problem in general for so many reasons. People gripe about this version of it sometimes. My only gripe is some way to restructure the presentation so deep nesting doesn't just push further and further to the right. Can be optional.

3. One of biggest complaints is how a tangent unrelated to OP takes up the whole screen and it's hard to find next reply to OP. This is actually two different problems: can't easily see how conversations are connected without parent links and them taking up the whole screen. The screen issue might be helped with little plus or minus symbols to hide a whole thread. The other one I leave to UX designers as it's trickier to balance form and function. A simple method might be an optional link on site top-level or comment that turns on some kind of highlighting putting different color, labeled boxes around grouped comments. Maybe limit groups to just first replies to OP & anything nested in them rather than everyones replies to everyone.

I think solving these three issues would be helpful. And notifications of replies, too. There's already a service for that but it's a nice feature to have in any HN client. Hope this helps you on next round. :)

If all 3 of these were solved, I'd be at risk of never growing tired of using HN on mobile and closing it to get other things done.

Appreciate the feedback as I put mental effort into that list. :) Anything else that should be on there that gets lots of gripes rather than one or two people's preferences?

I've yet to find a _better_ HN UI. All the ones I've tried so far (including this one and the one reustle mentioned) don't add any benefit to me over just using vanilla HN. They are also, in my experience, much slower than HN.

This one makes bad use of space IMHO and, much more importantly, has terrible contrast on basically all elements. Makes it incredibly hard to read for me.

This (1) is my goto alternative. Mostly because it's easier to go through comments. The author has a react native app in the iOS store.

(1) https://cheeaun.github.io/hackerweb/

Thanks for sharing, that is actually not at all bad. At least on mobile, that's more pleasant than HN for me!

You can change the default orange accent color to any color. its under settings > appearance.

YC will always be faster than 3rd party app, as 3rd party relies on firebase API. Firebase API is very slow.

The orange isn't the problem. It's the contrast on the text that's the problem. I tried to play with the settings but the contrast remains bad no matter what. The dark theme doesn't help. Essentially the text colour is much too close to the background colour making it incredibly difficult to read for anyone with a bad monitor or with bad eyesight.

At least on iPad this one is pretty good, nice size font and toggleable comment threads – https://cheeaun.github.io/hackerweb/

Looks like this – http://imgur.com/SdIaLGD

I second that -- use that UI all the time.

Nope: https://imgur.com/a/t9mUG

I agree, the front page should be filled up by the top post by default without a first click, but then that page might be a 404 under HN which is even uglier?

Heavily downvoted comments in the right pane aren't faded as they are on the main HN site. I find that surprisingly annoying.

No, I am having my browser using only half the screen, because today's monitors are too wide. And you put a wide sidebar there that takes half of that estate.

Quite a lot of sites today cannot adapt to screen resolutions smaller than about 1000 pixels horizontal (half HD resolution, on my work browser) or about 600 pixels vertical (resolution on my netbook). And don't let me start about Acroread..

I am also happy to report that HN works with Netsurf, your site probably doesn't.

The best I've found is hckrnews.com

Bookmarked that. It's has some neat features albeit uglier, front page. Curious, does it fix the age old problem of up and downvote being too close together?

I don't know, I can't downvote :)

Fair enough haha.

It would have been if it wasn't mobile-only :b

Not really, it only fills a tiny portion of my screen. I'll stick to http://hckrnews.com

Agreed. I've been using http://hckrnews.com for over a year now and I wouldn't ever go back to the normal HN site. I love the feature that shows you all the new submitted links since you last visited. No longer do I have to scan up and down the list and see the same links over and over again looking for new ones.

Thank you, this is beautiful and has caused me to finally sign up for an account after years of lurking.

For me I can read more quickly without jumping back and forth between pages is more important though, all on one page is really nice.

I used it on desktop and it looks nice there too.

I wish I can customize the theme a bit, the color and fonts etc, otherwise I read HN more efficiently there than the default site.

If you click the three lines/three dots at the top left, then "Appearance", there are a few options to customise the font and colour.

Indeed, wish it offer more pre-defined themes.

Thats my app.

* you can change the accent color and there is a night theme

* Web version doesn't have a login option

* You can download iOS, Android, Mac, and Windows mobile and desktop version from https://hn.premii.com/about/ . You can login, upvote, downvote, reply etc.

Web version uses YC firebase api, and it is usually slow.

Downloadable version scraps YC site, and its generally faster.

Renders nicely in desktop browsers and I'm a big fan of the mobile app.

Am I missing the login option?

Minor suggestion - I'd like to see more items on a single page. Could I have the option to condense the item UI vertically? Perhaps put the age, author and comment count in another column?

Its build for mobile.

No login option as there is no API. But you can download from the app store (ios, android, mac, windows), and it has login option. https://hn.premii.com/about/

I prefer it because it means less fiddling with tabs/the back button. Plus you can collapse comments.

But by default it's very difficult on my eyes due to the low contrast, so to make it at all usable I make use of a Stylish script to fix the text color.

I am the author of the this. Would you mind sharing a stylish script or screenshot. Love to see how it looks after your changes.

I don't think so. HN frontpage HTML is about 31201 bytes at the moment. Techcrunch 249162, Google 64871. Here, less is more.

Not that I think OP is very good, but '31201 bytes' has little to do with UI, unless you are talking about the specific use case of a slow connection.

Why do we all think that a simple list can be made simpler? What is it about the normal layout that doesn't work?

http://hckrnews.com/

I really enjoy hn.algolia.com for desktop. I also use the "Hacker News" app on iOS on mobile.

The UI loads quickly for me but the posts take a lot longer to load compared to Hacker News.

That's nice for me. It would be better if the font size of article is one size larger.

Settings > options > appearance > change font size and family and colors.

Just told the author to hopefully make this better for an easier daily read experience.

No.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

Thank you for linking, I had come across this before but couldn't recall the name.

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