Hacker News Offline Reader for the iPhone / iPod touch | Hacker News Reader

Hacker News Offline Reader for the iPhone / iPod touch

eightloops.com

31 pointsljansen30 comments

I think this is the third HN app so far. Is this because people who read this site and want to try writing an iPhone app immediately think about writing an HN reader? I know I did. :-)

We need a comparative review of all the HN iPhone readers!

I like the flash presentation on the site, I'm doing an iPhone app right now and am wondering what's the best way to put together a similar flash video of a screen capture of a iPhone app along with the touch indicator?

Anyone have any suggestions?

We used ScreenFlow for the screen cast along with SimFinger for the touch indicator. For site integration we used flowplayer.

Does this app download the hacker news comments as well? I should hope it does, as that's where a good 50% of the value from HN comes from, the community.

Seconded. The comments are a very big part of why I enjoy HN so much, and I wouldn't consider buying the app without support for them.

Based on the Flash presentation alone - well done.

I wish however that this was HN's native web interface for the iPhone. I personally have no need for an offline reading nor do I want to use a separate app for that.

Would you mind sharing the strategy you took to storing the sites offline?

I assume you grepped through the HTML source for external references (stylesheet, image, etc), downloaded each one of those, and then re-wrote the link before saving to disk?

I think there are several tools and libraries available for this job. E.g.:

  wget --mirror -p --convert-links http://www.example.com

That will mirror the whole site. If you are going to mirror a single page, a more sane command would be:

  wget -r -l 1 -Ppath/to/folder --convert-links http://www.example.com/

"wget" is not installed on a iPhone. You would use something like NSURLRequest/NSURLConnection.

It's installed on my iPhone ;)

Three20 has a killer HTTP disk cache.

http://github.com/facebook/three20

how often are people's iphones offline?

Their iPod touches often are.

a) This lets you batch your downloads, so you get it all done, and later reading is more pleasurable.

b) If you want something to read on the plane, you could load it all up at the gate and then enjoy it later.

Looks great - just bought it. :)

a) This lets you batch your downloads, so you get it all done, and later reading is more pleasurable.

b) If you want something to read on the plane, you could load it all up at the gate and then enjoy it later.

Looks great - just bought it. :)

Please let me know what you think of it. I may buy it as well. I just have a touch.

I live in DC and ride the metro, most of which lacks AT&T service (for now).

The NYT app is a life saver for this, I just download the morning's news on my way into the station, and then can read it on my commute.

As often as possible.

If I can do a front-load of reading data and only have the data radios on for a fixed time (ideally, over wi-fi), that's going to be less of a battery drain than the on-again/off-again of casual browsing. Not to mention that it dramatically improves the reading experience to not be waiting on inconsistent data rates and server speeds during my reading time.

Every week when I'm on a plane.

Service in Chicago sucks, so I'm often "offline" even though I have signal. I love the NYT app because I can preload the news and read later.

Looking forward to this. Will be using this on my commute for sure. This will also be very helpful for Wifi Only iPad users.

Can I just have Instapaper support in an HN app? Please...Pretty please.

How about this? http://www.icombinator.net/

no account support (login, replies, etc.); hit targets for important links are insanely small; when I last used it (maybe 12 months ago), it would routinely bomb out on me with bizarro server-side error messages.

I want Instapaper support in the HN app from Michael Grinich http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hacker-news/id339408916?mt=8

I asked him about that a couple days ago. I doubt he'd mind if I reposted his response. He said: "I'm indeed working on those features, although not as feverishly as my other projects. This app was mostly an experimental side project."

I stopped using icombinator.net after reading a comment that mentioned this service from google.

http://google.com/gwt/x?u=http://news.ycombinator.com/

I can't leave instapaper

Reply on news.ycombinator.com