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Hacker News Reader is Free Today

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18 pointsclarky0738 comments

What problem does this app solve? I find using browsers for websites is more usable for me than using an app. I can have many tabs open, I can copy anything I need, press on links and do what I have been doing on the web for 20 years. All those apps brake the web, and make it actually harder to use it...

I personally hate browsing HN in a browser, even on computer. I use a plugin for chrome that does something similar to the apps where I can easily flip back and forth between the comments and the article. Especially with the rapidly expiring links, I find flipping back and forth to be useful.

This also uses the bigrss to get several pages on stories instead of just one.

which plugins?

Hacker News OnePage - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-news-onepag...

HN in particular is a total pain on an iPhone. Even though the design adjusts to the width, the width that Safari chooses is much too small for the text to be very legible. It's probably like 3 pt or something which is technically readable on the retina screen but not very comfortable. And zooming is pretty worthless when the lines are long and you constantly have to pan around.

PG seems to have no desire to make it work better, so that's why these apps exist.

Has pg ever said why he doesn't just fix the stylesheet so it's usable on an iPhone? If you're not familiar, it looks like this: http://i.imgur.com/Mzrk6l.png

The site design is responsive to the width changing, but Safari just picks far too wide a width for a phone.

Well, all you need is a meta viewport tag, like so:

  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1, maximum-scale=1">

With that, viewport width will match CSS pixel width of the screen.

All you need is a couple fields in your profile that lets you use a custom CSS and a custom JavaScript file... You know, like the current `topcolor:` field.

I always thought that phones powerful enough to have apps are also powerful enough to have browsers.

How is this app better than just using a browser?

See the comment I made above - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4815266

I don't even like HN on a computer browser. I use the Hacker News OnePage plugin on chrome.

I use http://cheeaun.github.com/hnmobile/landing/ which does the job for me.

Same here. It works perfectly.

Practically any alternative interface is going to be better than the default site. Great site, but it adheres to minimalist principles to a fault.

Browsing with a desktop browser is annoying, while browsing with a mobile browser is infuriating.

The iphone doesn't zoom like the android browser and makes hacker news more difficult to use in portrait mode. (Tiny text and tiny buttons)

The tiny text problem, at least, can be solved with a bookmarklet for increasing the font size. In fact, having such a thing around is almost essential when using mobile Safari, at least if you're over a certain age.

You don't find it a problem (read: annoying) that you need to run a bookmarklet on every single page load?

Yes, yes I do. It would be far better if mobile Safari had a configuration for a minimum font size.

And even better if people stopped writing stylesheets that created unreadable pages on small screens. It's not that hard to write CSS that makes your site readable on any size screen. A page with no CSS works fine. If your text gets too small on a phone, you've added CSS that breaks it.

Even with the default Android browser, or Chrome mobile, I have the same issues. I have to zoom 5x's just to click an up arrow (or many of the other links), and some of the text is just as bad.

Anyone have any suggestions for an Android HN app?

I have this one currently:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.airlocksof...

Just curious what else you guys might be using.

This one - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rickylaish... and this one - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.manuelmaly... are the best ones currently imo.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4769779

I like: ihackernews.com

I'll check out the app though.

same here, i tried many apps and web apps a few months ago and i ended up saving ihackernews.com on the springboard. It is perfect (except that you can't see the older posts).

Shameless plug ahead. I checked all the HN clients for iOS (I think) and I didn't like any of them. Their designs are usually rough and they don't add much functionality to the site. That's why I started writing a better HN app and I'm documenting the process. If you're interested about it, you can see my last post about the app here http://www.rainycape.com/post/300/building-hackerful-day-2/ (currently writing post about day 3).

I don't like it. Pages seem to load slower than in Safari, it seems to think that people will read articles before the HN comments (target area is way larger), I find the text layout worse (it wouldn't change my opinion, but can't the "Show WebView of comments" toggle stick?) and there is no "Reader" functionality on web pages.

Dev here, just getting it out there hoping to get some feedback and reviews. Note, there is a known bug in the iPhone version that cuts the last line off on a few comments, but it will be fixed soon (and you can also just go to the web version instead of the custom comments).

It's a little unfortunate that there are two apps named "Hacker News Reader" and "Hacker News Reader!". Nice app though.

yeah, i had an "!" in the title at one point and it got modded out. Guess they didn't look into it enough to realize that's the name of the app (and as you noted is important)

I use the HackerNode iPhone app and find it to be a fantastic way to read HN from my phone. Not free though but I would definitely recommend it.

I liked HackerNode but the lack of the ability to comment (and lack of threaded comments) made me make this. Have they added commenting yet?

No commenting but I'm a read-only lurker on my phone so that hasn't bothered me. I'll give your app a try.

Flipboard is pretty good for accessing Hacker News. To be totally honest, this app doesn't seem totally useful.

how much did it normally cost?

it started at 1.99 and has fluctuated between .99 and 1.99

when searching for "hacker news" on the app store this app is 16 or 19. Very difficult to find even when you use the full name. Searching for 30 south doesn't help either. Apple's app store search is miserably bad.

Agreed. In this case there just aren't that many exciting things to call a hn reader app, but in general the search is really difficult since the changes this summer. They lowered the importance of the name a lot, so even finding an exact match is tough.

It's terrible and only getting worse. When Google released the official YouTube app, it was something like the 9th result in the search. The first three applications in the same search results didn't even have YouTube in the title.

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