Remix HN: Experimenting with the Hacker News user interface | Hacker News Reader

Remix HN: Experimenting with the Hacker News user interface

hnvue.com

54 pointsdporan35 comments

I find that one of the signifiers I use to decide which front-page stories to read is "how many comments are there"; sadly this view doesn't include that information.

Also, when opening a link from the sidebar, sometimes it takes a while for the page to load, during which time the previous page is still displayed. It'd be less confusing if the old page were replaced with a "loading..." message of some kind.

A new version -- hot off the servers -- now shows all of the classic HN info: points, poster, time, and comments. And there's also a "Loading..." message.

Thanks for the feedback, everyone! It's fun to do same-day development.

Perhaps this is blasphemy, but I...actually like the frames look here. It works, and it makes sense for what it's trying to do, imo.

I'd like to see points/comments in the left hand pane, but otherwise I love it.

(Also, am I the only one who kept recursively opening this story in hnvue?)

Well, I really hate frames.

Although doing that may use up more bandwidth, please make it ajax-like such that we don't need to see any of the original hn frames again (yes hn has no API which makes commenting much harder to achieve)

I have mixed feelings about frames, too. In this case, I think the benefits of seeing everything at once might outweigh the drawbacks. (It's all Dojo JavaScript, by the way. No actual HTML frames were involved in the making of this product!)

Dojo is a great toolkit that could use more evangelism. Showing separate sites like this necessitates some kind of frames, I thought this was a pretty good use of them.

Very impressed by Dojo. It's amazing how you can do almost everything declaratively -- via markup. That makes it easy to put together simple UIs like this one.

Yea, I used to be puritan about it and tried to do everything with Dijit imperatively through JavaScript, but it's so much easier most of the time to do it in markup. It's even entirely HTML compliant now that it uses the new custom "data" tag attributes in HTML5.

Well, I guess it is still HTML frames, just that Dojo created those nodes.

I am aware that there are no better solution for now.

Wow, this is the first site I've seen to use frames in about 10 years!

everyone has been using iframes though.

Iframes are everywhere, but usually in places where it's hard to notice them, e.g., in ads.

I have a widescreen monitor and I suspect most people do. How about making the content and comments appear side by side instead?

A "pop-out" link for each frame would also be nice.

Definitely a possibility. This is the minimal viable prototype! I'll have to think bigger for version 0.00002. :-)

I couldn't resist trying to open this particular link over and over again - disappointingly you can't get very far :)

The recursion makes for a fun Mondrian-like UI!

I don't mind the frames, it gives a nice "back to 1999" look :)

But I do miss the story points on the left frame, as I tend to look first for stories with 100 points or more.

EDIT: I think I'm going to use hnvue as my main UI for reading HN for the next couple of days.

The score would be a handy addition. That's not part of the RSS feed, but I'm using YQL to screen scrape anyway, so it wouldn't be hard to add.

I'm curious to hear how hnvue works over a few days.

Hey dporan this is awesome! It would be more awesome if you:

- could go to "full page view" when clicking on a Hacker News submission for best web experience

- could add a function to scroll the left and bottom frames where it was before "full page view" mode (at the moment you have to scroll it manually after everytime you visted a page and wanted to see it on full page view

- could only show the comments from HN on the bottom frame without HN navigation and all

I hope I could help to make the user experience better!

Cheers

All good ideas. Re showing comments without the HN navbar: that would involve some more complex screen scraping, but I agree that it would be nice to maximize the space for the most interesting info.

Could be improved to having a quick way to swap the sizes of the 2 right-hand frames. When I read HN, I generally read the comments first, then the article. If the comments were big first, then I could click something to make the actual page big, it would be nice.

Granted, I probably still wouldn't use the interface since I read from the RSS, but I think it would improve the site.

Perhaps there could be a hotkey to collapse the frames and serially focus the one frame - like Alt-Tab but internal to the site; or simply a floating toolbar with the standard layout, article layout, comment layout as option buttons.

I definitely use the number of upvotes, number of comments and post age as part of my decision whether or not to read an article.

I've used something like this for a few months actually. http://blog.libinpan.com/2010/06/hackernews-safari/

The advantage with the plugin in comparison to tnvue is that the classic HN-look is preserved (including number of comments).

This is very nice; please find a way to add the number of points and comments as others have mentioned. Contrary to some opinions expressed in the comments, I think that your use of frame is very appropriate and efficient.

Wonderful experiment. Bookmarked. Will be using for the next few days; have fun A/B testing.

-You're probably trying to differentiate from the original HN but I'd prefer to maintain the HN orange theme if possible.

Re the theme: I just used one of the Dojo defaults. It's easy to swap them.

Very nice. Maybe you could you apply a different stylesheet to the comments, and hide any elements which allow you to click through to stories. Just removing everything above the comment box would be fine.

I really like this view. Good job of putting all the useful information HN offers in one view. Now, how long will this be around? You planning on enhancing it?

I'm going to use it myself, so I'll leave it up and try to enhance it.

Nice. I definitely agree with the comments to show the points and number of comments, but apart from that I think it's really great.

If you get the chance, I'd like to see the adding of keyboard shortcuts for expanding/shrinking the different views.

Several weeks ago, I made a Chrome extension with an identical interface for the same purpose. I wanted to be able to read through HN in one window, article on top, comments on bottom, just as you've done. Like seeing I'm not alone.

I also ran into the same issues I see hitting your implementation, as well -- namely, sites that do not like to be framed ruin the HN-in-a-window viewer.

Alas, some sites do bust out of frames. I understand their reasons, but it does make things more complicated for a design like this one.

By the way, when a site does bust out of hnvue, I've noticed that the page can get into a weird state. Closing the browser window (or tab) and reopening hnvue is probably the best solution at the moment.

superb!

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