Show HN: News/YC - HN Reader for iOS | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: News/YC - HN Reader for iOS

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33 pointsbennyg46 comments

Okay, a few thoughts on the design:

- Hidden side menus are a great solution when you've got a lot of items to display, otherwise use a tab bar. I know sliding deck menus are stylish and all, but tab bars are always going to be faster to use if you have five or less options.

- I'm seeing a lot of sub-44pt controls here. Things like the 'go to comments' bar and some of the sidebar buttons are hard to hit due to their small size.

- The navigation bar here is far too prominent for something that displays such little information. You should really stick to a 44pt navigation bar with a title that actually adds context to what's being displayed.

Otherwise it's a nice looking app, congratulations on launching it!

Came by to say some of the same. I like side menu, its on a button and are options that need to up all the time. The comments 'mini nav bar' functionality could all be on the actual nav bar. 44 + x is too much real estate to constantly waste... you could have it disappear on scrolldown like safari does.

Gonna' implement the scroll-down on the next release. That's a great idea.

Thanks for the comments (and about the name further down, unfortunately I didn't consider that, but I'll stick with it for now).

I'm hoping to add some more options into the nav later, like using an API that allows me to add logging in/upvoting posts and some more settings options (theme being one).

Again, thanks for the comments and criticism, it'll make this app better for the next release.

Also one more thing, 'There's no unintuitive buttons' seems like a weird statement to me. What's especially unintuitive about buttons?

Guess I wasn't too clear (ironic with unintuitive haha), but I've seen a lot of apps that have icon buttons that don't tell much about what they're gonna' do before you click on them. It's my goal to make things as clear as possible and I'm already seeing some things to give more meaning to for 1.1

It's pretty good. A few user interface issues:

- The "Go To Comments" and "Return To Stories" buttons aren't styled as buttons, so it's not immediately obvious that they do anything.

- The gray bar at the top underneath the orange should really be transparent I think, it makes the top bar feel very thick and a bit clunky.

- There should be some indication that an article is loading when the UIWebView pops up. Users might not have Wifi, and it could be some time before any part of the page is rendered.

- I think the modal UIWebView should probably rise up past the top navigation bar. When you're reading an article there really isn't much need for it to be there, and every extra pixel is precious on a phone.

Nice app though overall.

Thanks for the comments, maybe icons would work better to make it obvious what they do. I'll play with that.

Okay, so I originally made this app for myself cause I didn't like the UI on other HN readers. In that vein, I probably didn't add some stuff that people would like in a HN client, so I want your opinions on what to include/remove/improve in v1.1 - don't hold back. I personally couldn't stand the design on the other similar apps and I want people to enjoy reading HN on their iPhones/iPods.

And yes, there's an iPad version in the works too!

-----

And if anybody is wondering, review time was at 5 days for this one.

  > Okay, so I originally made this app for myself cause
  > I didn't like the UI on other HN readers

I was thinking about creating HN reader myself for exactly the same reason. Tried out about 10 different readers was not satisfied with either of them (sorry, that includes this app too :( ). However there is an web app which gets UI right: http://hackerwebapp.com — and that's what I am using. And if I ever will do my own native HN reader it will basically have UI stolen from HackerWeb :)

Seriously, I really hope that some iOS devs would steal the UI from it too :)

This looks awesome, just wish I can log in and post comments using it.

+1 for Hacker Web. Works perfectly across my iPhone/iPad/Macbook. Interesting (yet effective) way to manage long nested comments too.

Will the iPad version be separate app or will there be a universal update? (so I know whether to buy it now or just wait)

The app is free.

Separate.

Not available on the Australian App Store?

Should be. It may take a little while to proliferate through Apple's system. After they told me it was "Ready for Sale", it took 45 minutes before a link worked for me. And as soon as it did I posted here haha, so it may be just a little bit.

I'd like to request for the ability to open links in comments.

Thanks for creating this:)

Definitely working on this. The function I had wasn't lining things up properly, so I may have to change the framework of how I'm doing it to get it to work. It was super buggy and I didn't want that clouding it up for initial release.

It'll be in v1.1

Nice job, here are my suggestions:

1. Top orange bar is way too thick, especially since it stays fixed and does not "scroll away" after paging down. We don't all have iPhone5's.

2. I agree with others who have suggested making it somewhat easier to hit the "go to comments" and close story buttons.

3. Sharing! Would like to be able to copy link to clipboard, post to fb/twitter, send to instapaper/readability/pinboard/delicious and last but not least, email.

Looking forward to v1.1 !

Nice, I like it a lot. I tend to read HN on my phone and this could be a real improvement. A few questions:

- How does voting work?

- How do I login?

- How do I get to page 2?

- Returning to the article list may be clearer with a back arrow

- I'd love to see landscape mode

1. Yep working on it right now (landscape mode)

2. Unfortunately I haven't figured out how to get to Page(n) with the api I'm using for this: http://hndroidapi.appspot.com/ - if anyone uses this for their own and knows, hook a brother up! Edit: Also, this API doesn't allow for logging in / upvoting. I'd love to have this in there though. Anybody know any other APIs that allow this consistently?

3. Duly noted.

Thanks for the feedback, I hope you like it. Hopefully in less than a week I can have a solid v1.1 submitted to focus on everybody's issues/complaints.

1. The dark theme doesn't sit well with me. Particularly, the grey on dark grey is grating.

2. The buttons on the sidebar are atrocious.

3. The header bar is much too thick.

4. The font is inordinately small. This might be an idiosyncrasy of mine, but I think a larger font would be preferable.

5. This incorporates all of the intangibles that are significant but difficult to articulate: the app doesn't feel like an app. Rather, it feels like a webpage both aesthetically and functionally. I'm not sure how to describe it, but the app doesn't feel right.

I appreciate your criticism, there will be a light theme option in 1.1

I like HackerNode more because:

1. It contains more columns than only "FrontPage", such as "Jobs" and "Comments"; 2. The UI seems more concise. Although there are not indent between comments, the text is much clearer.

However, neither of these apps can be used to add comments. So I can only come back to my computer and add this comment on the web page.

Hacker Node is really awful to use, though. Half the stories go to 404s, because it percent-encodes hashes and actually sends them to the server, and trying to select a story involves poking around on the screen until you finally hit the right (tiny) part of the title.

Why I like this so far:

- It's the closest Alien Blue:Reddit that I've seen for HN

- Opening web pages within the app is much more comfortable than the standard way of doing so, which is terrible in my opinion

Great work!

I'd lie if I said I wasn't inspired by Alien Blue, it's by far my favorite and most-used app on my iPhone. Thanks for the kind words!

The only thing that threw me off was the loading of web pages. There does not seem to be anything to let the user know that the web page is loading. Granted, most of the users of this app (being HN regulars) would probably assume that a page is loading, but if I didn't notice it the first time around, then maybe others did not either. An activity indicator may help in this situation. Also, the minus sign (left of "Go to Comments") makes me feel that the view should minimize upon click, which would cause the horizontal minus sign to rotate to become vertical. I can elaborate on any of these thoughts if they don't make enough sense.

It looks good. I'll download it when I'm home later. This could all be solved with about 50-100 lines inside a media query though... Come on HN!

In China, downloaded this and it does not populate content. Just endlessly searches for it (spinning loading wheel).

Hmm, try removing from working memory (don't delete the app!) and reopening to see if that fixes it. May be having a hard time loading the site.

Since the API you're using is hosted on App Engine, it won't be accessible from China. App Engine is blocked by the Great Firewall.

Damn, thanks for the heads up.

lots of HN readers in China -- would be great to be able to use this! looks nice and headed in the right direction.

thanks for the heads up. this explains a lot!

Very clean UI. Would love to see indication of what articles I've already read.

Great idea. Would adding a "hide read" feature be something anybody else is interested in?

YES! But I would strongly prefer to get the voting/commenting part working first. I come to HN to participate in the discourse, not just read web pages.

One thing I would say is it would be nice to have a "Reader"/"Instapaper" mode for articles. I haven't looked at iOS APIs in a while, so I don't know if Apple is exposing that functionality or not (my guess is no); but maybe Instapaper or one of the clones would be willing to do some kind of partnership. I would pay for that upgrade on my iPhone.

Overall, I really like this and can easily see myself pulling it out in the mgrocery line. Yeah, there are some minor nits, but I think others have covered those well enough. And I love the dark coloring, too.

I'd say that name is just a little too similar to chpwn's HN client, news:yc.

Would be nice if it could support iOS 5.1.1.

iOS 6 adds a lot of goodies for devs. I find it hard to blame devs of apps that move to 6.0. A jailbreak sure would be nice! =) Wait for 6.1 (remember 6.1 beta 4 expires soon!).

There was a Hacker News reader for iOS and then it stopped loading news and gave errors. So I found one called Hacker Node that worked better. Which one of this, I don't see a link to the App Store just an image.

Clickable link: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/news-yc/id592893508?ls=1&...

Good but there is no option to share the links like Hacker Node offers. I like to email links to myself to look over later on so I can focus on them more.

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