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Comment by JoelSutherland | Hacker News Reader

I started on this Tuesday after work. Because of some great APIs that are available, it really came together quickly. Most of the credit goes to this one in particular:

http://api.ihackernews.com/

It's all JS/client-side templating. Ask any questions if you have them. It works great as a Shortcut app on the iPhone.

edit: Lots of requests for a back button -- I'll be sure to add that!

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Really great. One piece of feedback: Clicking on text works great but you can't use the browser back button to get back to the overview. That means you have to reload the page after every click on text.

ihackernews is great but I feel there is many bugs when it comes to comments. I use the Hacker News app for android created by Jazzy Chad which is great but the ihackernews api for comments always fails to load. I wish there was a fix for this.

Nice work. I work in mobile web and I applaud the simplicity and speed. That said, to really make it snappy, bind to 'touchstart' instead of 'click' --- or implement a 'tap' event.

Also, I might go a couple font sizes larger. It's readable, but small on my phone.

All in all though, it's pretty nice. It's a good example of what mobile web can do and showcases the power of client side development when you have an API to support it.

Which phone out of curiosity? I was actually thinking of knocking the font size down a bit! There must be some inconsistency I can fix.

It's fast because I didn't both with a mobile web framework. I've found those (especially jQuery mobile with its DOM caching) to perform horribly. This should scroll as quickly and smoothly as your phone can.

On iPhone 4 all fonts are ok (please, don't size them down) except for the ones on sliding out, black panels - these are a bit too small.

I'm on an EVO using Dolphin Browser.

...and you're totally right about jQuery Mobile causing suckage. I used it for a couple features and I'm now ripping it out in favor of a little handrolled solution I built. I even replaced the jQuery core library with XUI because it's even smaller has most of the goodies I use 99% of the time.

For everything XUI doesn't have, I really like XUI.extends in its simplicity better than the jQuery plugin architecture. Super easy to add whatever else you need.

Performance is night and day better now.

Curious what issues you had with jqm. We're always looking for feedback.

You can steal most of this stuff out of jqm, if you grab the events and vmouse plugins. Month's worth of work to speed up clicks and simplify the way you bind to events in the page.

[edit] jbail means to say there's a 200ms (or so) delay from touchstart to when click is fired in mobile browsers. He's obviously relatively experienced with mobile web dev :)

Thanks -- I just made some changes and iOS and Android are now firing on touchstart. Additionally I cut the slide in animation time by 50%. It feels much snappier!

I also added a back button so it can more easily be run fullscreen.

keep in mind touchstart is fired in swipes as well so binding to touchstart only could have unintended consequences. Like I said there's a lot to consider when it comes to solving the click issue on mobile.

It would be nice if I could go directly to the comments from the article text.

Also, "back" doesn't seem to work on your site from my Blackberry.

Rats. I've tested iOS, Android and WebOS but not Blackberry. Do you have one of the newer ones with a webkit browser?

I'll might have to add a back button in the header...it's a shame to have to clutter it up.

I'm using the new webkit browser and the back button works fine for me, as does the rest of the site - great work! Opera mini doesn't work for me though, just stays stuck on Loading. I noticed someone with Android mentioning the same thing so I think it's an Opera specific thing, not BB.

Where are you hosting your node app? Aren't most node hosting plans kind of expensive?

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