Hacker News Reader

Comment by publicfig | Hacker News Reader

This is the first website I've ever added to my home screen on iOS, and I was completely unaware that by doing so, I could view the site as if it was a full screen app, not having to deal with the safari interface. I was completely unaware of that, and can now really see the utility in adding web apps to the home screen

Also, this is great. Really a solid interface.

EDIT: I would honestly like to see this scale on desktop, just because it's a pretty great interface for Hacker News.

EDIT 2: Nevermind, realized that it worked by acting as a sidebar on wider monitors. That makes sense.

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Following your recommendation, I did the same, and I really enjoy it. The interface addresses many (all?) of my typical annoyances with the otherwise great news:yc app. * it swaps between comments and articles quickly * nice, unobtrusive indenting for threads * holy cow folding comments! * pleasant styling

I haven't figured out how to comment, but I'more of a lurker, so that's fine (it'll keep me from making a fool of myself too much). And there's that initial loading time with a blank, white background that is almost certainly the iPhone's fault.

Swapping over to it now that this is written!

Actually, I could be wrong, but I think the load time is coming from the fact that the developer had to move the application over to S3 in order to deal with the heavy load with this being on the front page, and with S3 not supporting gzip, it's causing a bit of a delay. Once it's loaded, however, the app is very fast in switching between pages and comments.

I apologize, I actually only meant the initial startup. The speed of everything once it starts is fantastic!

I see this delay on forecast.io as well. It could very well simply be a latency issue.

It works fine as a desktop app actually. The sidebar is just one part of the app, and if you click on a post, you get the full article / comments on the right side.

Looks like no framework was used to build this (except for Zepto, I guess). Total size for JS is 55kb, for comparison Angular 1.0.7 minified is 78kb. CSS adds another 30kb, including the ico font that's base64 encoded in style.css. 115kb for the whole page on a fresh load, on subsequent loads it's only something like 4-5kb. Very nice!

Sorry I forgot to mention, I also use Fastclick(https://github.com/ftlabs/fastclick) for iOS.

JS is uglified. Libraries takes 55% of file size, and rest is my code.

The UI performance for your web app is impressive. Did you use any other libraries besides fastclick? Or was it a lot of manual work and research to make the UI perform well?

+1. I don't know what are your plans with this app, but I would love to learn more about how you did that. Do you plan to open-source it?

+1. I would love a more detailed "How I built the HN single page app" post.

Yep, I figured that out! Now that I know I like the sidebar better than full width.

Have you seen http://hackerwebapp.com/? It's very similar and equally slick, but styled specifically to match native iOS apps.

I worked on a similar app [1] and it runs as a standalone web app on the iOS homescreen as well. A couple of things that I love about it:

  1. I've done away with a lot of the features the OP has - such
  as comments (unless it's Ask HN), time of post and link. This 
  has made it more lightweight and faster to load on slow mobile 
  networks in my area.

  2. Also, it's only updated twice a day since I actually built 
  this for myself to stop spending so much time on HN.
  
  3. And since I found myself only reading the front page on my 
  commute to  work, it aggregates all the front page articles into 
  one nice page instead of opening one article up at a time.

Not to take away from the OP, but would love any feedback on the whole "less is more" approach.

[1] http://hn.dinopost.com/

This is cool. Finding myself spending too much time on HN, I'm looking to write something similar myself with the purpose of making a weekly digest of only the top stories.

Looks like a few [1][2] have already made the efforts to write filtering based on karma score.

Edit: The OP's app is very close to what I want, but instead of limiting to top 10, use a point threshold directly.

1: https://github.com/fractastical/Hacker-News-Filter 2: http://hnapp.com

Thanks for the feedback. I'll probably open source it at some point. Right now, the components are somewhat tightly coupled.

I prefer the way this one preloads the story contents; I take the subway to work so I have a while without internet access. It would be nice to have comment links at least though, so there's the option to read them if it seems interesting. And the 'open all' button doesn't work for me, assuming that's what the '^' in the top right corner is supposed to do.

Hi Kevin, Thank you for your feedback. The '^' was meant to reveal a translation feature that I was working on, but I suppose 'Open All' would be a more worthwhile feature to implement. The markdown on HN makes it a little tricky to render comments (with their nesting), but glad you mentioned it [1]. Anyone second that feature request?

[1] Wasn't sure of how many people read comments before the article, or read them at all - I stopped when I found that it gave me a biased read, especially on the Show HN type posts.

I hadn't known that either, nice find!

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