Show HN: A Fast and Lightweight Android App for Hacker News | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A Fast and Lightweight Android App for Hacker News

dreambits.net

9 pointsgetdreambits12 comments

There are many excellent apps on Android for Hacker News. However, a lot of them don't follow Material design, haven't been updated recently or simply don't have all the features available on the web.

I built this app to make a fast, full featured, yet lightweight native client. Please try it out and let me know what you think.

Looks nice! FOSS?

I haven't published the code, primarily because it isn't in a share-worthy state yet. Definitely happening sometime soon though.

Pretty nice!

I've been using com.premii.hn 6.0.6 (which, now that I check, actually no longer appears to be in the Play store).

The main thing yours appears to be missing is the ability to reply directly to a comment.

Other requested UI tweaks:

- Highlight the username of the OP when they comment

- Add downvote button

- Add toolbar buttons to toggle directly between comment view and article view

com.premii.hn was my favorite too; it worked surprisingly well given that it was webview based. But, as you said, it's been taken off the Play store and not getting any more updates.

Re. your feedback:

Replying to comments directly can be done by long pressing the title of the comment you want to reply to, which brings up other options as well.

I'll consider your suggestions for UI tweaks, but is downvoting even possible? Or did you want an option to hide a story/comment only within the app?

Downvoting is _definitely_ possible on HN once you have enough karma.

Didn't know about the long-pressing, which is a result of long-pressing not being a user-visible action. Replying to a comment is definitely worth its own per-comment button at a minimum.

After playing with it a bit more, refreshing comments seems to be iffy. I had this specific thread open when there were only 6 or 7 comments, and tried hitting Refresh repeatedly later when there were about 10 comments visible in my desktop browser. None of the new comments showed up, even when I backed out to the threads list. I think they only appeared after I did a complete refresh of the threads list and reopened this thread.

Overall, though, it's pretty good and I want to switch over - just feels like it needs a bit more polish first.

Thanks for trying it out. What you saw might be due to over-aggressive caching, which generally is used to provide a fast experience even under bad network conditions.

Manually refreshing should actually do a full fetch so it sounds like a bug, which I'll look into.

I saw that viewing user profiles is an option. That made me think that HN's search is often missing from app versions of HN. "Search first" (or 2nd, or 3rd or n'th) might be a vector worth developing.

Search is something I miss often as well. Thanks for the suggestion.

Can you add a link to https://github.com/cheeaun/awesome-hacker-news ?

Yes, I will. Thanks for the suggestion.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com