Show HN: The Poetry Corner – A React Native app to read public domain poems | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: The Poetry Corner – A React Native app to read public domain poems

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34 pointsarchiepeach18 comments

TLDR - scratched my own itch with an app, added a pro plan and got my first subscribers this week!

Last December I started digging into poetry, it was a topic I always thought I liked, but just hadn’t explored very much. I soon discovered that a lot of the poetry sites online had pretty annoying designs, e.g. ads right at the end of the poem, (muting any emotional impact).

I also wanted to be able to easily save a list of my favourites to come back to.

I decided to build and release a react native app which addressed these needs/issues. It took about 4 weeks during the winter break to release an MVP to the App Store. The backend is using Firebase, which has been superb in allowing me to bootstrap the app quickly.

I soon added a poem of the day feature, which forced me into curation (needing to find 365 poems for the year!). I’ve discovered so many amazing poems and poets as a result. One of the things I love about tech is that it can touch so many different domains and industries.

Anyway, fast forward six months of continuous development, adding features and refining the design, lots of late nights. I finally had enough of a feature set to demarcate some out to a paid plan with a free trial. And the first users have actually started subscribing!

I’ll soon be ramping up ads, currently just on the App Store Search, but soon with Google and Instagram. I’ll be seeing if I can spend x amount on ads to net a return in subscriptions. If so, I’ll be scaling it as fast as the budget will allow.

For the instagram ads, I’ll be marketing the poetry app with a mindfulness twist. Some people have already talked about this connection online, and I’ve personally experienced a deeper bond with nature and awareness of my own feelings as a result of reading so many poems.

So that’s where the app is now, and where I have in mind to take it. It’s been super fun working on it and any feedback is welcome!

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What a great idea. What I like about poetry is it makes the idea of people in general more plausibly likable by reminding us that a strangers inner life is possible. If we were only as deep as our tweets and the other things we do for reflected approval there would be really nothing to save. It seems urgent to find a way to see people as more than the symbols we have come to represent.

Funny how media means we are all relating to one another as symbols, and then we're surprised when we treat each other like them.

App downloaded. In the Collections list, a category for "Wise" would be a big draw, as poetry is a dense vehicle for education. (thinking Blake's proverbs of hell, Auden's one liners, Holzer's truisms, etc.)

This is a great idea and it looks super clean. One thing I noticed is the spacing and line breaks are not always rendered the way the author intended. For example in Percy Shelley's Ozymandias compare the text in the app to the Poetry.orgs text https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46565/ozymandias

I like that you're focused on curation rather than "algorithmic" feeding of content. The Criterion Collection does this with movies. One thing they do is have guest curators make lists of their favorite movies. My suggestion would be to have authors create guest curations of their favorite poems. Just an idea.

Just downloaded it. As someone who used to read more poetry and has fallen off, I like the idea! Maybe this will prod me back into the habit.

One bug report: I can’t select text in the poem. Wanted to look up a word and can’t figure out any way. Was that disabled intentionally?

Looks nice, congrats on the launch. Two things that aren’t clear to me from the App Store page (I haven’t downloaded the app):

1. Why is account creation necessary? Why can’t I just store/sync my bookmarked poems with iCloud?

2. What the subscription is or does. The most recent change notes say that a Pro plan with ‘additional features’ was added but doesn’t elaborate beyond that.

Thanks for the feedback!

1. Account creation isn’t actually necessary, if a user wants to back up their saved poems they can just use iCloud to sync them.

2. The subscription largely provides full access to all curated poems. It felt like the most appropriate thing to make part of the pro plan. I didn’t want to take anything away from users who had installed the app before the pro plan was introduced, so they have been automatically added to it for free.

Congrats on the launch! I’m interested in using this app as I’ve also been looking for something like this and your implementation is very sleek. Regarding the subscription, do you have plans for future pro-only features?

For anyone in Germany, if you need to recite a poem, I have a poem you can remember from my book (printed! :-)

   Au
   Au
   Au

That's gold!

Clean UI. Nice work. Do you hand curate each poem?

Beautiful! Any plans for web or Android native?

Absolutely. Fortunately using react native will make it easier to be on both platforms.

This is a beautiful looking app, but I can't help thinking it exemplifies everything that is wrong with modern web development.

Firstly, why is this a native app and not a website? Oh actually, it is a website: https://thepoetrycorner.app , except some parts of it (search?, accounts?) don't seem to be working in the browser.

Lets see what the pages are like. Here's one: https://thepoetrycorner.app/robert-lee-frost/the-road-not-ta...

The poem itself is 769 characters of plain text, including the title, attribution, and line breaks. 769 bytes.

The webpage is 810 kilobytes, in 25 files.

The app is 39.3 megabytes.

The App store page says there are "more than 30,000 poems to explore". I bet you could fit all 30,000 in less than 39.3 MB if you tried.

Looking in web inspector I see lots of JSON files loaded on every click. I wonder if it works with JS disabled. It does? Page weight drops to 56.6 KB, which is quite reasonable. So why did all that JSON need to be loaded?

This could have been a really clean and lightweight website. The content is plain text with an occasional image. It's perfect for plain HTML. Instead it's a 40 MB native app. The road not taken, indeed.

Take a look at

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

You can offer critiques but fulminating is not really what either Show HN or regular HN is for.

Yeah, you're right. I apologise. It looks beautiful, and I'm sure there's an audience. Just not me.

You can still edit both comments.

All feedback is interesting, so thank you :)

> why is this a native app and not a website?

I’ve wanted to build one for a while, I’m a web dev by trade so a side-project is a good time to try out some new tech.

Secondly, I love the web but I find it’s revenue models a bit too indirect, e.g. advertising. People are simply more likely to set up a subscription for an app rather than a website. And I really didn’t want to monetise it via ads.

The json files loading on the site is actually just Next.js preloading the content for instant page transitions.

The site is mainly used for sharing poems with people who don’t yet have the app installed. I’m intentionally keeping the app a first class citizen as that’s just what I wanted to do with this project.

Thanks again!

A 39 megabyte app will be wonderfully petite in comparison to its siblings on a phone.

If size is a worry for you, then you might enjoy Poets' Corner[1] which has been going since 1994. The design of the site might not be 2020s chic, but at the end of the day it's the words in the poems that count (though many poets would argue that the white space between the words is just as important).

[1] - https://www.theotherpages.org/poems/

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