Meet news:yc, the open source Hacker News client for your iPhone. | Hacker News Reader

Meet news:yc, the open source Hacker News client for your iPhone.

newsyc.me

261 pointsnews-yc53 comments

Thanks for releasing it as free software. https://github.com/newsyc/newsyc

Excited to see some mobile traction for HN, but posting the same link three times a day might be frowned upon.

I agree completely. And, yet, I did exactly that.

Why? I'm not sure. A more logical choice would have been to wait a few days, choose a new title, and then try it again: maybe find something that HN would agree with the first time around. Or maybe I should have finished it completely, released it on the App Store, then posted a link to that. Who knows. But at this point it's too late, so all I can do is apologize for messing with HN like I did, and hope that this contribution offsets it. :(

I'm glad you did it! I wouldn't have seen this if you hadn't, I'm going to use it, plus you proved something I'd always believed was true-- time of posting can make the difference between a 15-point story and a 140 (and counting) point story. (Not that it's the # of points that matters, just the resulting front page viewership.)

What I find interesting is that the first two submissions got a total of 15 points over >10 hours each.

This one has 78 points in around one hour

Timing matters :)

The HN rating system could normalize for this - decreasing time decay for periods where ratings are less frequent.

On the page it says it'll probably be $4.99. So it is open source, but it may not be free.

"Free" as in speech, not as in beer.

I stand corrected.

For the uninitiated (as myself): "“Free software” does not mean “noncommercial.” A free program must be available for commercial use, commercial development, and commercial distribution. Commercial development of free software is no longer unusual; such free commercial software is very important. You may have paid money to get copies of free software, or you may have obtained copies at no charge. But regardless of how you got your copies, you always have the freedom to copy and change the software, even to sell copies. "

From http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

As far as I can tell, this gives anyone the freedom to purchase then give away the software. Meaning that there is no moral, ethical, or legal barrier for the original developer to charge $5 to the first purchaser and for the first purchaser to then give out free copies to everyone else.

Perhaps I also need to be initiated to comprehend this...

You are correct :)

It's 'Free Software' under the definition of the Free Software Foundation. It's a term that's synomonys with open source

> synomonys with open source

No. All free software is open source, but not all open source software is free software. The conditions for calling software "open source" are weaker than those for "free software".

AFAIK nearly all OSI approved licences are also FSF approved, and vice versa. Do you have an example of something that is open source, but not free software?

It's free if you have an iPhone dev account. :)

And in response to the last line of the README, it loads and builds absolutely fine in Xcode 3.

Upvoted for multiple reasons: 1) The app itself looks pretty good. 2) Open-source 3) You're a high school student too. (What year?)

I never thought there were that many highschoolers on Hacker News (year 12 here). Cool to know there's some fellow adolescent hackers out there.

Sophomore, so I'm 15 right now.

Upvoted it for (1) a great pre-sell pitch (2) established communication channel with its target customer (3) open up opportunities for future engagement.

Excellent!

I ran across this earlier today and added a small feature to it[1]. The author is very receptive to pull requests, so I highly recommend forking away!

If you're interested in contributing and stumped for things to add or fix, check out the included TODO file.

[1] https://github.com/newsyc/newsyc/commit/01bc7bf30c10a2abd8f0...

With all the effort going into that app and the other web wrappers mentioned around here, I may be missing something but why is there no media query in HN CSS to adapt itself to iPhone, iPad and other (WebKit-based at least) mobile devices. I weight it to about ten lines of CSS at most, setting font scale, body width and vote up image size. I am on the verge of creating a bookmarklet to load such additional CSS and sync it to my devices but couldn't resort to that yet because of it being a total hack that I'd need to call on each HN page load.

Ever since Garry joined YC, I assumed (and suggested) this as one of the top things they get on making...just a simple UA detection for mobiles and more usable interface in CSS as you mention.

Here's a question. Love the app, but can I login to my account? I don't have a normal YC-account, but rather one through Open-ID with my Google Id.

That's a good question, actually. I've never used OpenID so I have no idea what's involved in that, but I'll make a (mental?) note to look into seeing if it works (and probably fixing it) soon.

The simplest way to do it is to open a browser view to the login page, then let the user do whatever and just watch the cookie store for the appropriate key. As soon as it shows up, close the browser and use that key in the app. This works for all the login methods.

You can't login to an OpenID account through the app at present, but this is pretty easy to add. I may submit a patch for this some time soon.

Looks awesome, I'll happily buy it for $5 once it hits the store.

It's also nice that it's open source. Contributing to an actual iOS app could be a nice way to get a taste of iOS development without having to start a whole project from scratch (if you have no previous experience.)

Try wordpress for iPhone (http://ios.wordpress.org/development/) which has been developed for a long time. However I agree that it's easier to pick a project with less code in it to learn.

Another way is by writing an app.

Nice work, this is the new best HN iPhone client.

I've been pretty happy with the Hacker News app by Michael Grinich, but this looks promising and competition is a wonderful thing.

I just bought that app after using http://www.icombinator.net for a long time. I like the app but wish it did things a little differently--default to mobilized articles, go beyond the top 30 articles, load comments more quickly--so it's great to have something to customize and hack on. Thanks!

There is also http://ihackernews.com.

I moved from icombinator to ihackernews since ihackernews acts more like a normal web app (icombinator locks the page as it reloads and makes it hard to come back to articles). However, it has a hard time grabbing comments (most don't work right), so it's frustrating to use.

What happens is my IP gets blocked by YC. So until the traffic dies down or I change my IP address, it errors out while getting the comments (YC serves me a blank page).

That issue is actually why I went with a distributed approach to news:yc. Yeah, it's a pain: no remote updates (App Store restrictions) and a lengthy review process for each change needed (do you know about how often the markup changes, btw?), but I don't have to deal with any caching, rate limiting, or anything else this way.

(Of course, I don't even think you can do anything like that on the web (even JavaScript, cross-domain issues), so your approach is probably required there.)

It hasn't changed since I made http://ihackernews.com

You could probably get away with remotely updating some sort of declarative grammar/schema, as long as it doesn't allow arbitrary code execution.

If it isn't too slow, you could do the parsing with some remotely-updatable JavaScript, using UIWebView's stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString:.

There are some decent HN iPhone apps (still, it's nice to see another one because the existing ones are certainly not perfect) but all the iPad apps (there are four or five) are pretty bad — especially the visuals but their functionality is also very poor. If I didn't overlook anything all just present you with a list of articles and upon clicking on one you get two tabs, one gets you to the article, the other to the comments on HN.

This is great, thank you!

Took me a while to figure out how to get signed in with instapaper... Turns out it's in the Settings app. I wish Apple provided an API to link from an app to its settings page, and back to the app from the settings.

+1 to this, I spent ages looking around the app trying to find a settings icon, with no luck. I think an Instapaper login would work much better in the More section of the app, than in the global settings app (especially if there's nothing else there).

Until then, there's always https://github.com/futuretap/InAppSettingsKit

To be fair, Apple's guidelines suggest that you avoid settings in your app as much as possible.

No Android love?

No Android love, basically, because I don't use Android and this was written (as is often suggested) so scratch a personal itch: Hacker News wasn't fun to browse on my iPhone. Perhaps Google will give out Android devices at I/O and I'll be able to work on a port then.

HP/Palm did send me a Pre 2 development device, though, so I may port it over there if and when I start using webOS for my primary phone.

Chad Etzel wrote a pretty good Android app already! It's super well done.

https://market.android.com/details?id=com.jazzychad.hn&f...

There are actually several Android HN browsers, but I don't recall if they're all on the Market.

Wait, are you chpwn by any chance? Because you quite extensively use the slide-behind header trick from his last post on http://chpwn.com/blog/

That is correct.

Writing this comment with the app from my phone, thanks alot.

This is cool. Oh, you're a high school student? Awesome.

Chpwn, u have gained more respect from me with this app.

where is the android version??

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