Show HN: New Hacker News web client
hack.ernews.info
hack.ernews.info
My favourite HN client on phone is http://cheeaun.github.io/hackerweb/. It's lean, fast and looks like a native app on the phone. I've added a shortcut to my mobile's home screen, using the 'Add to Home Screen' option in Chrome, which gives me a nice quick launch icon.
The downside of both these clients is that you can't login or post using them.
Definitely not as beautiful as the one you linked..
Also the message that someone has up voted X is quite annoying, I’d suggest making that a lot more subtle. Maybe convert it into a subtle animation effect on the circle badge - maybe a short subtle glow.
Keep animations subtle - dial everything down a notch or two.
Keep up the good work though - I like what you’ve done so far.
No need to refresh your browser anymore to see new stories and comments.
Also, I used a responsive design to be able to read the stories on my mobile phone.
For now, I only show the top stories, up to 100 of them ( that's how many the API gives you anyway ).
If people find it useful, I might add other things. Hope OAuth becomes available so I can add up-voting and comment adding.
(am I the only on who fears that Material Design (when overused) can become the new Flash?)
I have no problem to disable them ( optionally maybe? ) for whoever thinks they are annoying.
I also have comment counts and whatever data is used to dim downvoted comments on my API wishlist ( my own implementation is http://insin.github.io/react-hn ).
An endpoint for just ask/show/jobs items would also be nice.
I have two stores, one for the news stories, and one for the comments. And then a smaller one for the notifications. I don't use any state in the components. Everything propagates from the top level and the stores.
The counter component doesn't have a state, but when it sees an update, it just adds/removes a class and that's how you get the animation.
So instead of
.list-item:hover {
margin-bottom: 4px;
margin-top: 4px;
}
.list-item:hover {
outline: 3px solid #ccc;
z-index: 10;
}
That's what I would expect when you are presented with a change - link gets underlined, bottom slightly "opens"
edit: Actually, those visuals could also mean a link would open. Probably even more than comments.
As far as dealing with my taste in UI I use Hacker News Enhancement Suite[0] for computers and MiniHack for mobile[1](not affiliated). The primary reason I switched to MiniHack was I really wanted the ability to log in and comment. I spend a lot of time working on just an iPad (writing, etc.) and it's great to be able to comment as myself without any of this fancy browser stuff.
[0] https://github.com/etcet/HNES [1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/minihack-for-hacker-news/id6...
I have web client http://hn.premii.com/ that uses new APIs (No login).
iOS client https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hacker-news-yc/id713733435 where you can login and upvote.
(This is also why I'm not terribly fond of the default animation of the OSX Dock)
The horizontal indentation on the comments might be a bit aggressive, and each comment is taking up a great deal of vertical screen real estate. Further, the clickable "more" makes reading long comment threads difficult without a great deal of scrolling.
It seems to be optimized for mobile viewing, which is good. Dobbs knows how I hate clicking tiny links with my fat fingers. But, when behind a desktop client, the CSS could be adjusted such that it takes better advantage of my screen resolution.
I already have some thoughts on how to handle the comments section, I agree it has to be very efficient cause the whole point of the client is to let you get in and out of the comments section easily. Reading the headlines is the easy part.
If anyone is a designer or has design suggestions, I'm happy to see them.
Is there anybody knows about the load statistics when a story on Hacker News gets on the first place?
What i mean is; how many requests are made to a web page, what is the req/seq and etc?
I guess this would be useful for me and other people to get ready for possible load on our site to be sure if we can handle this load.
Top 5 is more like 50-75.
Top 15 is around 25-50.
Those numbers aren't req/sec but simultaneous user. There's a difference between the two but it still gives you a number to compare things to.
All you read about how the top 3 gets 75% of the traffic in Google is true to about every places where there's ordering.
As for the load, it depends a lot, that website seems to poll HN's API quite a lot so maybe that's how they get down (HN throttle the # of query).
I made it on the top 5 with a VPS on 128MB of RAM and didn't even feel it (without caching). You need a LOT of traffic for a blog to be affected by the load.
Obviously, when you do a lot of polling/database intensive stuff (games, etc.) the bottlenecks are easier to reach.
What would make me use this instead of news.ycombinator.com every day however would be:
- the ability to hide stories you've already read (some box to tick like a todo list) or are not interested in. They take up so much space, so there is a lot of wasted space after 5 mins on the site and reading/seeing I'm not interested in the top stories. I don't want to click 'show more', I want new headlines to replace old unwanted headlines
- Color coding the actual divs to signify hotness and using size of divs to signify importance/upvotes would be nice. The font is so thin in the orange circles (and the spacing between them and the text) that I cannot read it in my peripheral vision and have to glance back and forth between titles and ranks
- hover movement is disturbing enough for me to navigate with keyboard instead of mouse
This is a feature I'd love in the current site as well
Nice job on your webclient. Loving the material design-eque buttons :)
Some light criticism:
1) decrease the padding between each story space, there's juuust a touch too much white space
2) the big attraction to HN is indeed the comments, so accessing or invoking the comments should be really easy. In your version, I have to click the comment icon or the comment numeral count link... why not instead have the entire space (excluding the story link) open up the comments?
Good job on separating the comments visually.
This is much more usable, not to mention responsive.
Well done!
You mean doing a pinch gesture with your fingers to zoom is painful?
Nice job!
Suggestion: when expanding the comments, add an option to Show All comments instead of just loading a few each time
Please, think of the children.
This is why engineers are not designers. Left up to engineers, every pixel would be crammed full of "content", all at 11px font.
I tried to reply to your comments but I was getting the "you're submitting too fast" message...
From [1] "If people find it useful, I might add other things. Hope OAuth becomes available so I can add up-voting and comment adding."
Upvoting without reason may be ok, in that case at least we know that upvoter is in the same/similar logical region as we are. Downvotes may indicate differences of opinion but do not indicate what/why are those differences. So reasons for downvoting clarifies those reasons and other view points, which I guess is the reason for "comments" in the first place.