Tell HN: HNdroid, Hacker News android client | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: HNdroid, Hacker News android client

gluegadget.com

176 pointsgluegadget86 comments

.apk: http://gluegadget.com/hndroid/HNdroid.apk

Screenshots: http://www.flickr.com/photos/amir_mohammad/sets/72157624870942817/

Diggin' the app :) My OCD took over and couldn't stand having the simple HN icon in my launcher so I took the pleasure of making one :)

I did two variants. One is a bit more traditional, while the other matches the name of the app more.

V1: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/104495/HN/hndroid_app_icon.png

V2: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/104495/HN/hndroid_app_icon_variant_2...

In the spirit of open source, here is the PSD: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/104495/HN/hndroid_app_icon.psd

By the way, I've never actually made a production Android app icon before so I don't know if you can just drop it in or not but enjoy :)

Wow, thanks!

Best part is that if you use LauncherPro, you can edit the icon on your home screen to use one of these images instead of the one specified by the apk. :)

I do use LauncherPro :D The pro version actually! Great $2.99 app on Android.

I honestly really like the transparency of the current icon. I can see the fish in my wallpaper aquarium swimming behind it.

Here's the source code: http://github.com/amir/HNdroid

At the first I thought I'd better clean-up the code, fix some bugs, add features requested here, and add some comments before releasing the code, but I then thought it'd better to release the code as it's in the released build.

Thanks!

good decision. thanks.

Here's a QR code for the APK. You should toss it on the page.

http://qrcode.kaywa.com/img.php?s=5&d=http%3A%2F%2Fglueg...

I concede defeat. gluegadget's app is better than mine: http://ifdefined.com/blog/post/A-Hacker-News-app-for-Android...

It was a great source of inspiration though, thanks!

And better in a major way than my http://ihackernews.com and http://api.ihackernews.com, in that authentication is done locally on the device.

Good work gluegadget!

I love ihackernews! The integration with ViewText makes it a perfect choice to read HN stories on my phone. Thanks and Great Job!

Your app icon still can beat up gluegadget's ;-). Anyway, thanks both for your works!

My younger son made that icon, and at first the ad was for my older son's website that sells tshirts, http://hackertees.com/ I'll pass along the complement to my younger son.

I was using your app for a long time. Helped pass the time I spent in lines and during boring meetings. I'll miss your great app as I move on to gluegadgets.

Thanks for developing the app, I've been using it for quite a while and really like it.

Just to be clear, does this mean you'll no longer be developing your app?

I can't think of any reason why I would spend more time on it. Why are you asking?

I think I would stick with yours if you were planning on continuing development for it. If you're not, I'll probably switch.

Great app. Can you please add a "Read later button", that will save it to Instapaper/ Read it later/ Delicious/ download to SD. (the option of where to save could be configurable). Thanks.

Even better would be to hook into the system's already existing Share intents, so that any app already on the phone set up to share information could be used to handle this. Eg, the Hard Copy app (excellent Instapaper app written by an HN member) hooks into that list, so I can save links to Instapaper from email, browser, etc.

Thanks! Nifty idea.

Any change one can get to see the source? I am not really happy installing stuff from random locations on the internet and give it my password (no offence, just a rule of tomb).

Would be a fun community-driven open source project.

Yeah, releasing a project like this without the source seems really silly. Why turn down free help?

Valid concern.

I'll release the code as soon as I found sometime cleaning up the code, and commenting it.

Leads to another discussion, should HN support openid login, via google or any other openid provider? That way I wouldn't have to remember yet another password.

If that were the case however, I have yet to see a mobile (iphone, android) app that does openid authentication nicely.

What would really be interesting is tying openid to a hardware identifier in a mobile phone...

HN does support OpenID login.

Just verifying what you said: My account authenticates with OpenID.

I stand corrected, it does look like you can log in via openid.

However, I attempted to log in via google, and I was taken to this site called clickpass.com, which then asked for access to my google contacts. No thank you...

Is HN using some sort of 3rd party to accomplish openid logins with google? If so, why? It's very easy to implement google openid logins.

Clickpass is a YC startup. If you don't want to use it click on the down arrow to the right of the button and enter http://www.google.com/profile/{your username}

That's all fine and good. Why do they need access to my google contacts?

I don't know. You should ask them.

I've never been able to get HN's OpenID login to work -- it used to work at some point, but when I log in, I just get the error message:

"Bad OpenID login."

If I log in to ClickPass first, it sends me to a screen where I can enter my HN username/password -- but when I fill out that form, I'm taken to < http://news.ycombinator.com/openid_merge >, which just says "Unknown."

From this experience, I assume the OpenID support in HN is more of an afterthought than a real implementation.

My vanity Google OpenID never works anywhere but my domain and MyOpenID works with HN fine.

At the risk of similarly being voted down, I'm experiencing the same error. Trying to associate an OpenID with my HN account results in a return of "Unknown" from the openid_merge link.

Seems to work very well! Great job.

Btw, 'successfull login :)' should be spelled without the double 'll'.

Edit: on second thought, I'd really like to be able to see the amount of comments in the overview. And perhaps even a small visual difference between opened-before and never seen yet articles...

Thanks for suggestions, I'll see if I can put the comments count somewhere in the layout.

And Sorry for the typo :(

Humbly requesting OpenID support, and BTW here's how you do it:

Open a browser view to the login page, wait for the HN cookie to show up, then close the browser and use the cookie to scrape the site.

I have all this implemented in a client I was working on. I'll share the code if you're interested.

I'd personally be very interested in seeing this code.

http://github.com/jedediah/HackerTouch

I added HNdroid to Hacker News's Resourcey page. Please upvote it if you like it: http://www.resourcey.com/site_details/2/news.ycombinator.com...

(If you don't know it, Resourcey is a small webapp I made to help keep track of resources like this.)

I'm commenting from inside the app. Nice, clean interface. My only suggestion is better error messaging. I tried to post a comment before logging in, but instead of warning me and/or providing the login form, it just looked as though the comment had posted successfully.

My bad, as you see in Main activity you can't upvote when you're not logged in. I had to do this for Comments activity too (disabling Comment menu, and reply/upvote context menu).

Just what I've been waiting for :) Is the scraping/parsing done on in the app or on the remote end? (i.e., do I just have to count on HN being up for this to keep working?)

It all happens in your phone, even Login. So your credentials are as safe as your web browser.

Nice app! :) I think I'll end up using it if only because the upvote buttons on the HN website are so ridiculously fiddly to use on a mobile device...

One small quirk: I couldn't figure out how to upvote stories after logging in - I could see the menu entry to upvote comments, but there was no menu entry for upvoting on the main screen. Turned out I needed to manually refresh the main story list before it turned up.

Have you submitted this to the Marketplace for the poor, helpless AT&T customers who cannot side-load apps?

--signed Poor Helpless AT&T Customer

He seems to be from Iran and therefore barred from the Marketplace (at least from the Google Marketplace).

I totally missed that, thanks.

Any chance of getting the source into a public repo? I'd be happy to add it to the market...

I'll also volunteer my currently-unused Android developer account, and my time to build and upload new releases to the Market if it gets open sourced.

I've been meaning to get involved in some open source Android apps, but I've not yet gotten much beyond developing apps for my own phone and needs. At least this is something that I would dogfood every day. :)

It is now in the Android market for those with access - just search for HNDroid

Maybe try this utility, assuming you have access to a Windows box: http://forum.androidcentral.com/showthread.php?p=236589#post...

You can enable side-loading in case you were wondering. Here are a few methods how, I personally used Method 4: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=738376

It's very well worth it---it's very convenient to just scan the QR code to the download link and install from the downloads folder, all from my phone. (Edit: be careful obviously, as others have mentioned.)

-- Non-helpless AT&T Customer

Cool app, this will be one of my new vices! I tried looking through the sourcecode to do it myself, but I'm not incredibly familiar with Android app structure or if maybe there's some convenient helper methods to do this in Android apps.

I was just wondering if you could maybe add the following to the comment text in the Comments view to render HTML elements like > (which should be >) and & (which should be &). Also, maybe do this:

  comment = comment.replace(/\*(.+)\*/,"<i>$1</i>")

Also, I noticed the comments view doesn't space out paragraphs or render preformatted text (inside the <pre> tags, which HN applies to lines that start with two spaces).

My desktop is orange, could you give your icon a solid background colour so that I can see it.

Same here :)

Great work! I love the spartan interface. Btw, any chance of getting a prefetching option?

Allow this application to:

    * read phone state and identity

No thanks.

It doesn't require to read your phone state, I forgot add a minimum SDK requirement, and Android adds that automatically for some compatibility reason.

I believe Android requires that for any sort of background syncing, so that the application will automatically stop checking whenever Background Data is disabled by the user (Airplane Mode, or manually unchecked in Settings). But then again, I could be wrong.

Nice app, just one thing. If you press on an news item and it happens to take some time to load (due to low connection speed) the dialog box saying "Loading, Please wait..." is not cancelable (by pressing the Back button). It might be useful to enable this in one of the next updates.

working pretty well for me. I've been using hn reader but I like that this shows the scores. Makes it easier to filter.

Couple things. it appears to be using a non standard input form for comments as none of the typical android auto complete is working. i also tried making a few newlines buts it not showing up in here. also when youre on the comment thread and you hit comment and then flip the screen, it reloads the entire comment thread which is rather annoying on slow connections. otherwise working pretty well. (i stopped manually fixing the things auto omplete normally handles for emphasis. ie 'i' instead of 'I' and youre)

Update from laptop: newlines apparently work but don't show up in the comment box. Auto complete and reloading the comment thread are still issues though.

On the HTC Evo running 2.2, the app loads ok but crashes when I click on an individual story.

Same for me. It also loads more slowly than going to the web page directly.

Cool! I like that you have the source on github. It feels a little poky on my Droid (OC'd to 800'hz) but works great! I also realize I could just fork on github & make it faster, but I haven't much spare time at the moment.

I just noticed the karma widget. I laughed at first and then found myself adding it. What have you done?!

I now have a screen on my phone with a handful of karma widgets. Its like a HN leaderboard that will continuously taunt me.

I very much want to pronounce this "Handroid". Am I the only one?

Cool app!

Consider adding in settings support for the app. That way you could change account@server. This would be useful for people reading other deployments of the HN source.

Perhaps I'll just do it myself ;)

Just gave it a go, very clean, simple and elegant. Just what I needed.

Thank you very much for this. Do you have a donations page? I'd gladly give a couple of dollars if this works out.

Thanks!

I really appreciate it, but I can't accept donations for the exact reason I can't put the application in android Market.

Ooh, can we have a custom color? You can take it from the HN "topcolor" setting or just a setting in the options.

Also, it'd be nice if the karma widget opened the app.

On a related note, what's the best HN app for iPhone?

Try my web app, http://ihackernews.com

If you want a native iPhone app, Michael Grinich has one: http://michaelgrinich.com/hackernews

awesome web app!

Not to down talk the existing state of iOS HN native apps - but last I checked, they just weren't worthwhile over simply visiting the website with mobile Safari. There was no capability to view more than the top 20 submissions, upvote, threaded comment view, etc. These things might have changed since I last used the application, but there is plenty of room for improvement. It's tempting to build the client myself, unfortunately I'm booked solid with work for at least the next three months. I'm sure someone better than myself will come along and put together something awesome.

Been waiting for this! :) (sent from my phone)

Nice app!!! Keep up the good work! Would love to have custom colors though so looks like the original HN Reader ...

I can't open the "Coming Home to Vim" link, from the app. It just crashes. I have it setup to open the comments.

Hello from the app! Works great, thanks!

Works great here too, thanks!

Good job!

Opening the menu crashes the app on my Samsung i7500 / Android 1.6

This app is amazing! Will it support HN's OpenID login?

I still like ihackernews.com on my android.

I already have a client. It's called Browser and has this great ability to open other pages on the interwebs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com