Show HN: I developed a native macOS Hacker News client

I developed this b.c. I found that I didn’t like HN mixed with other work/school related tabs, and realized that a separate app would be great for me. I believe that apps should use the most native-like UI possible — especially Cocoa on macOS, so I aimed to be the most ‘Mac-assed’ HN client possible.

Unfortunately the current app is in fact pretty unpolished — it’s in a usable state, but there’s a lot of missing features that one would expect from a ‘full-featured’ HN client. Probably a bunch of unknown bugs as well :-(. I would very appreciate any suggestions on feature additions or simple bug reports. Thanks!

Its extremely inefficient, to the point where I have a better time curling the HN web page and piping it through python beautifulsoup

Regarding a native app vs the using the HN website. The HN website I think is pretty ideal for the type of content its displaying, a native app doesn't give you much over having a HN tab open. I guess only if you want to read HN but not have a web browser open? But how often does that happen?

The only benefit I see from a native app ( and why I use one on Android ) is the ability to save articles and comments for offline reading, say, when I get on a plane.

A roadmap of planned features would be nice or some tickets that other people could help with.

I'm not sure how much time you plan on spending this, but I'd personally probably be willing to buy a version of this if it was able to do notifications on replies and similar features hn lurkers might want. Other interesting paid features could be read-later list, favourites, cross device syncing of read indicators and lists, etc. If you don't wanna deal with paid features maybe consider enabling the github sponsor feature so people could optionally pitch-in.

I still have the landing page up which warning, looks awful on mobile https://mackernews.com/

But congrats! I stopped selling my client and it’s starting to show age for my personal use too. Will check this out. Do you have voting and commenting working? That’s one thing I miss the most that stopped working on my client.

My only complaint so far is that I can only see about 12 items in the app on one screen, vs the whole front page in a browser. Adds a lot more scrolling.

How many of you prefer to run a native app rather than the web app?

Personally I hate installing things on my desktop if there is a website because it is just another thing I have to manage. (Even more so because I have multiple Windows, Mac and Linux boxes I'm bouncing around between during the day and rather just have sync'd Firefox bookmarks than have to install s/w on each box.)

Am I in the minority, majority, both, neither?

I'd also consider the sidebar include 'My Posts' and 'My Comments'. Maybe it has those, but I couldn't tell, as I turned off outgoing network access to firebase before logging in just to be on the safe side. Any reason you're connecting to firebase rather than storing preferences locally? I'm worried about my HN credentials being stolen.

  function hackernews() {
    if (document.location.toString().indexOf('news.ycombinator') === -1) return;
    document.querySelector('#hnmain td').style = 'background-color: #55b6f2;';
    var i = 0;
    function render(user, html) {
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      div.innerHTML = html;
      const date = div.querySelectorAll('tr')[5].querySelectorAll('td')[1].innerHTML.split(', ')[1];
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      const about = div.querySelectorAll('tr')[7].querySelectorAll('td')[1].innerHTML;
      if (about.length < 60) {
        style += 'display: flex;flex-direction: column-reverse;margin-top: -39px;border: none;background-color: transparent;';
      }
      div.innerHTML = about;
      div.style = style;
      user.querySelector('.age').innerHTML += date ? ' ' + date + ' ' + parseInt(karma).toLocaleString() : ' (x_x)';
      user.appendChild(div);
    }
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      if (username.indexOf('soheil') !== -1) return next();
      
      const html = localStorage.getItem(username);
      if (html) {
        render(user, html);
        next();
        return;
      }
      fetch(username)
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        setTimeout(next, 3000);
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    next();
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