Hacker News for iPhone ($3) app is insanely great | Hacker News Reader

Hacker News for iPhone ($3) app is insanely great

michaelgrinich.com

14 pointspclark31 comments

With the risk of sounding like a sour guy, I'm just going to say it: why do people pay money for apps that are essentially web browsers in a shiny package?

I am not against people making money by providing better access to content that is available for free (who hasn't paid for the odd Twitter app), but just take a look at the list of features on the app's promotion page:

  * View top submitted stories, optimized for iPhone
  * Explore comments and threads
  * Browse web links without quitting using the in-app browser

All of these things are true for browsing Hacker News in mobile Safari as well. That's hardly enough to earn the predicate "insanely great" or the $3 price tag in my world.

Admittedly, using Hacker News on an iPhone is not the best mobile browser experience (it could certainly use some css @media queries and perhaps a meta viewport tag, essentially few minutes of work would do the trick), but that hardly warrants a native app, especially if it's not free.

"Admittedly, using Hacker News on an iPhone is not the best mobile browser experience"

That's precisely why people are willing to buy an app like this: to improve the experience. Yes, "fixing" HN is easy, if you're pg. If you're just a reader, something like this offers a fix today, for three dollars.

(I agree with you, by the way: I won't pay money for a glorified web browsing app. Just pointing out that I think there's a place for apps like these, if only as a means of pointing out to site owners what they could improve.)

I agree, although I meant my comment to be taken in general (there are so many of these apps, for so many different websites).

In the case of HN there actually has been another reader that fixed the mobile experience for free (as mentioned in trimski's comment): http://toadjaw.com/hn

Well and why should I get this app?

HN is a really lightweight webpage, which looks good even on mobile browsers. The app navigation is similiar to the browser nav and even commenting is similiar as within browser. so why spend $3 to have a bookmark of HN?

I prefer to use ToadJaw (http://toadjaw.com/hn), which was linked to on here recently.

EDIT: It was created by HN's own ronnier. http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ronnier

HN _looks_ decent on mobile browsers, but doesn't handle all that well on them.

On iPhone: font sizes are really too small, voting arrows are practically not hittable without zooming in and trying to zoom in on the articles list confuses Safari (probably because of all the nested tables)

On my Iphone browsing HN in landscape just needs one time zooming to become readable. I now switched to palm pre and there it is even much better in landscape, i dont need to zoom.

yes, its a personal feling. but i think one time zooming is ok and not worth buying an app.

You're right, but I find that there are so many tap targets because of the table rows and cells that one double-tap zoom ('auto-zoom') is a hit-or-miss affair in mobile Safari . Even on the iPad, where the default font size is less of a problem.

Does anyone else see some but not all comments in tiny text sizes for no obvious reason, on iPhone?

Yes. Sometimes both the comment and the author line too, other times just the author line is tiny and the comment text regular size.

I'm surprised at the complaining about the $3 price. If something saves me 2 minutes of time, or makes my life the least bit more enjoyable, I'm more than happy to pay $3 for it. That's less than adding bacon and cheese to 2 hamburgers, a coffee out, or a 6 pack of coke.

It's a truly trivial amount of money, and if you'd otherwise like the application, not buying it because it's "too expensive" astounds me.

(I have no connection to this app, its author, or any iPhone authors for that matter)

Well it is not the amount of money the complaints are about. It is the fact that it is sold. The complaints are about the fact, that the app offers service which you can get for free by just using your browser, with just one (max. two) taps less than it. So it is just a HN related mini browser. And imho this not really a justification for an app.

Even the argument "it saves me minutes of time" isnt an argument in my eyes as these are truly trivial 2 minutes which you should be glad to spend on something you like as the moment just before HN appears is the moment where you can mentally prepare and calm yourself to enjoy the time you read HN. See it as anticipation and spend the $3 on a coffee which you enjoy while reading.

Insanely great? These Jobsian adjectives have suffered an inflation of Zimbabwean proportions.

I thought insanely great was more of a Douglas Adams thing? Well, he really liked Macs too.

Lol. Zimbabwean proportions. That's a good one. I have to remember to use it sometime.

One suggestion: make Readability the default option for the articles, with a link to the original article.

I would probably buy the app if it was the default.

Or even better, run it through Google's mobile formatter and add a stylesheet, so you download the article quicker.

http://www.google.com/gwt/x?u=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator....

I'd also like to see Instapaper support. My flow in the app is usually: Open app, read headlines, check comments of interesting headlines, then possibly jump to the article. I'd rather be able to just save it straight to Instapaper to read later. Not sure if this is how any else uses the app though!

I spent like 3 minutes waiting for the video demo person to type some long comment, so I could see the rest of the app.

Hah same here. He should have just stopped typing after "Wow."

Actually, I've been a bit disappointed with it. I miss being able to send a page to Instapaper, which is something that become standard in other apps (like RSS readers).

I won't buy an iPhone app that's using Flash inside the phone screen to demo the app. Use of Flash suggests the author doesn't know how to do rich interfaces without Flash, so the app itself can't be that good.

Granted, if I could see the demo, I might discover I was mistaken.

http://imgur.com/VdUK2.png

No, using Flash means the author might not know how to do rich interfaces with Javascript/CSS/HTML or that he prefers to do rich interfaces for the web in Flash. Or it could mean something else.

Since the iPhone app is written in Objective C, which isn't an option on the web, his choice of Flash for the demo really doesn't tell us anything about how good the app might be, does it?

Suggestion: make the video on the website usable on the device the software is meant for, or just put up a bunch of screenshots.

Feedback to the owner: The screenshots are displayed behind the flash movie. As this is a jquery fancybox I would propose you just visibility:hidden the flash movie when someone clicks a screenshot (there are hooks in fancybox to use) and make it visible again on close of the fancybox (also a hook for this).

Insanely great if you ignore logging in with OpenID. Apparently I was the first person to ask for this, so chances of an implementation were low. Shame.

And yes, really HN just needs a mobile stylesheet. If I had time I’d make one, but at the moment I don’t :/

There's also http://www.icombinator.net which is formatted to the iPhone. I read Hacker News via RSS, so I'm not sure how the full experience is through that site or compares with ToadJaw mentioned earlier.

I kinda like the app, but the comments get very laggy on older devices if there are a few of them (like 100+).

free on android! (had to say it)

I've been waiting the iPad-compatible release since April...

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