Materialistic – Ad free, open source Hacker News client
play.google.com
play.google.com
It is a nice counterpoint to overly heavy web that we have unfortunately gravitated towards.
First, no downvote action. We need this to push down trolls and sockpuppets.
Second, voting is inside a menu, yet this is a really common action.
Third and worst, when I use a browser on HN, every single link now asks me to select an app. Not once, but for each different link type it seems. After the fifth time (choosing 'Remember my choice' each time), I was so annoyed I uninstalled Materialistic.
End of report.
No downvote is a known issue, partly because I can't test it, so I'm not confident I'll deliver a reliable feature.
I agree that upvote should be more visible. Currently it's available as an option tucked in popup menu, as well as via swipe gesture, which is not very discoverable.
3rd one is a feature called 'deep link' which is quite common in Android. It should remember your choice if you choose 'Remember my choice'. I don't know what went wrong here as it is a platform feature and out of my control :(
Thanks for checking it out anyway.
I suspect you've got a bug with the deep link feature because other apps only show this menu one time. Yours shows it over and over.
While we're talking, I also found the UI rather busy with stuff that seems unnecessary. Half the fun with HN is its simplicity. If you ever get the urge, think about doing an Apple and removing stuff that people don't use.
Nice work, anyhow, and thanks for that. Consider making a paid version of the app with no differences, except you get some money back from it.
I'm wondering if my post would be enough :p
If you don't have enough score, drop me a mail ;)
That's Android's fault, not the fault of Materialistic. I have the same problem totally random on my phone, too.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.airlocksof...
sure, its one more query to run but i think it would be fast enough.
It's so close...
Performance can be laggy and is something I'm trying to improve.
There's also a "/flag" call with only "id" and "auth" to flag comments / articles. (with "un=t" it unflags) The link says "flag" or "unflag".
I don't like how sparse material design is, but oh well.
If there's anything I could change, it would be to add a setting that turns off swiping when I'm inside a story (to switch between comments/article/readability) along with swipe vote/reply for comments.
I just cloned the repo, opened it in Android Studio and after a few version tweaks in its Gradle setup, it sprang to life on my Nexus. So I can attest that it's painless to clone and build it, which in my experience with open source is 95% of the battle (where the other 95% is getting the PR accepted :-/ )
This has been my experience often times as well. Especially when it's node/ruby/python projects that expect the privilege of dumping files all over my global file system. Anyway, there's no excuse for un-reproducible build environments like that these days.
All of my (new) projects have exactly two requirements: `make` and `docker`. Everything else needs by the build environment is handled by nature of using docker. `make docker-dev` drops you in an environment with build tools installed, with the project source code mounted as a volume so you can use all your normal tools on the host.
It's pretty clear the site is terrible on mobile, and it's not a hard thing to improve. Make the font bigger, and (especially) make the buttons much, much bigger (or further apart).
Actually - why don't they fix that on the desktop version? Fitt's law and all that.
My own personal solution to this was to write an intercepting proxy in Perl CGI like it's 1999. Then I can fix the HTML with regexes.
(But the ones on iOS aren't bad..I've had the most luck with one called "Hacker News" by Premii)
This is why most developers can't make money creating mobile apps unless they're for gambling or freemium games.
How about "Hacker News client by Trung", or "Trung HN" for short.
I was stumped multiple times trying to find this app under apps starting with letter "H" on my phone. Moved it to home screen now, but the name can definitely be improved.
No shopping list of features :). Just wanted to say good job (posted with Materialistic)
1. The vote up status seems to get reset or so it seems from the app. I had invited this post yesterday, by today the thumbs up icon color was black again. It looked as if I did not vote this thread. So I clicked on that, and then the thumb icon was green. Then I went back to the main page, and remembered to type the following point. So I came back to this thread and the thumb icon was black again. It looks as it the app is remembering if I have already voted for that thread. Does HN allow one to vote any article multiple times?
2. I like the concept of the navigation overlay. But can you please add an option to disable the vibrations each time that button is used? It gets pretty annoying after navigating few comments.
2. Sure. I added vibration because I tend to mis-swipe so I added vibration to give me some feedback. But I understand not all users may like it.
Also I realized that I have a crazy number of typos and incorrect auto corrections in my comment above.
Would you add the ability to edit comments in future? :)
Thanks!
You did indeed get a 5-star review out of it, though :)
Alternatively app can aggressively load everything up front, which is slow; or paginate content. To me it tends to feel faster when u have progressive UI change (empty card then fill it) than abrupt change (completely empty then all items appear), so I decided not to paginate.
I also can't seem to figure out how to consistently jump to the next top level parent comment with the nav button. It seems to jump to other comments lower in the current thread which I'm trying to skip past. Am I missing something?
Overall love the app though. Love that I can click a user name and see their profile.
One other odd thing is when I open a HN Notify email link telling me I have a response, I can't figure out how to go up a level from the response comment to my parent comment they responded to in order to remind myself what I posted.
Swipe down the button should go to next same level comment, or if none it goes to the next one, which is the 1st child.
User-related content support is quite limited at the moment as I need to crawl HN web for that.
My use case is that I'm scrolling and I get bored with a thread. It isn't much different to swipe up on the thread to scroll down further if I wanted to keep reading, and there is no easy way to just jump to the next top-level thread. I'm left either having to collapse several levels of comments to condense things, or scroll until I hope I find the next one and don't miss it.
At the very least, I feel like this should be configurable behavior for the button.
But again, this is just me, so you might have data saying people want otherwise, and this is free so I shouldn't complain :)