Show HN: Hacker News Client for Windows Phone 8.1
windowsphone.com
windowsphone.com
All the various sections and categories on HN are supported – the front page, new, show, shownew, ask, best, active, jobs. There's an integrated browser with mobilizer support, and you can instantly switch between the browser and comments with a simple swipe. Comment threads are color-coded and collapsible.
This is my first non-trivial project that I actually finished and released, so I'd appreciate any feedback.
Not to much of a fan of the colored bars for nested comments, shades of the same color (we already have an accent color on WP) might be nicer. Might also be nicer to people who are colorblind.
The address/toolbar below the article feels more like Android than WP. On WP you usually get an explanation of icons in the toolbar when stopping up because their captions are right underneath the low end of the screen. Took me a while to figure out what the icons meant which IMHO isn't that great UX. Also a reason why I like the toolbar design on WP, because it's compact and supports labels if the user needs them. Not sure how to incorporate the usual toolbar design into the current workings of the app, though.
When tapping the '...' button the animation of the ellipsis feels like it rotates around the wrong pivot. It doesn't do so when swiping to the left. Maybe that's because the scrolling left animation of the bar is eased when tapping the button and the rotation animation is not. Maybe its even easier to bind the rotation angle to the current horizontal shift of the bar (coming from WPF here, so maybe it doesn't make sense).
Clearing the browser before loading a new article would be nice. Loading takes a while and tapping on a headline just to see the old content can be a bit strange.
1. I assume "the ability to content" means voting/commenting? ;)
2. The advantage of those colored bars is that they are very easy to visually parse, while also requiring very little indentation. In fact, it would take 40 levels of comment nesting before half the screen width of a regular size (non-phablet) device is used up. However, I see your point, and will probably add an alternate comment threading style later on.
3. The address bar for the browser is actually very similar to the standard WP browser, which also doesn't have the usual icon labels. Back, forward, refresh, stop, more, and share should be self-explanatory, so I guess you were having issues with the mobilize and open-in-IE icons? I might change those out for the reading mode icon that IE uses [1], and the IE icon, respectively, which should hopefully make them more obvious. The reason I did not use them in the first place is because I have not been able to find vector/font versions of those icons. Also, I agree with you on the WP app bar, it's really well designed, however since it's an OS component it can't really be customized which is why I'm not using it.
4. The rotation angle is already bound to the horizontal scroll offset. As for the rotation direction, I tried both ways and this one felt better to me. I'm not sure why scrolling the bar in one direction should cause the rotation to feel wrong to you though, maybe try scrolling the bar by dragging instead of using the button and see if it still feels weird?
5. That's a very good point that I never thought of. Fixed, and should be available along with some other minor design changes next week.
BTW, would you be interested in beta testing a Reddit client I'm currently working on? Your feedback has been the best I've gotten so far, much appreciated :)
[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2014/03/04/introducing-re...
2. In my suggestion I thought about using the same indentation style (which is nice and space-saving, indeed), but just using different opacities of the accent colour instead of individual colours for each indentation level. But again, that's probably personal preference and not a hard rule :)
3. The share icon is common enough by now that I know it, but I had to tap the last one (open in browser) to know what it does. Hopefully the IE icon may be used in that context. Perhaps labels for the buttons might still be added, in the usual fashion: http://hypftier.de/temp/wp_ss_20150103_0002.jpg – they'd be hidden below the screen's bottom edge by default; dragging up a bit would reveal them as usual. Also your dragging gesture behaves the same as elsewhere, which means that dragging up just a bit to reveal the labels would drop the bar to the bottom again after letting go.
However, looking at IE now, it doesn't do that for the single icon on the app bar that you can choose, but that might be because you can choose it and therefore know its purpose. Back, Forward and Refresh indeed need no labels.
4. I think I found out why it looks off. The pressing and releasing animation where the icon drops a bit down and bounces up again plays at the same time, which means the button comes up again during the scrolling animation, making the rotation look wiggly. But right now my tired eyes fail to discern any difference. Disregard this, then ;)
5. I'd be glad to, although I'm not that much of a heavy reddit user. HN is bad enough in terms of a time sink :D
6. Another minor thing: Up until now I didn't even see that there's a screen to the left of the headline list. And now I noticed that you get there by pressing the ⇄ button. I'm not sure, as I've never designed a UI like that, but it seems to me the more-or-less default idiom for invoking such a thing is a hamburger menu button on the top left of the app (http://hypftier.de/temp/wp_ss_20150103_0003.png) or using the app's icon in the top left for the same purpose. But that's more an Androidism, I think. The canonical way on WP would probably be a Pivot control, but that'd kill the swiping for going back to the browser. Not sure right now. Interaction feels slick and is nice with Hacky News, it's just not really native to WP in some places. The lack of the Pivot control also means that you have to swipe back to the start screen from the browser on the app/address bar, even if there is no browser history to go back to.
7. A few typos: »Water you doing here ?« There should be no space before punctuation (except in French where people do that ;)). Settings: »Always use a colored (orange) til« should be »tile«. Credits: »open source libraries« should be »open-source«.
8. My usual view on a help section for mobile apps is that if you need it, you should probably redesign your UX, but there are only so many things that can be made discoverable, admittedly. Also I may have an interest in UX, but am not an expert ;)
Again, it's a slick and well-designed app, and thank you for making it. Just because there are 8 points above doesn't mean I don't like it ;)
3. The reading mode button in IE does not have a label either, so that only leaves the open-in-IE button. Hopefully with the IE icon that one should be obvious as well.
4. Oh yeah the tilt effect, it doesn't really make much sense for those buttons beneath the browser anyway so I removed it there.
5. If you don't mind, I'll email you using the address in your profile once the beta is out. Might take a few more weeks.
6. I was worried about that screen not being very discoverable. The navigation is indeed a bit Android-like, so I tried to compromise by using another icon that makes sense (switch) instead of the hamburger icon. However it seems many people don't realize what the switch button does, and miss out on the settings menu because of it. I'll probably have to replace the app icon with the hamburger icon. Also, you can always use the back button to go back, is that not obvious (honest question, even if it sounds weird)?
7. (1) "Water you doing" is just a silly pun, I'm surprised you pointed out the extraneous space but ignored the "water" part :p (2) That is a margin/spacing issue, did you increase the system font size? The settings screen is kind of thrown together with very little customization, the toggle switch does not wrap its label by default but still there should usually be enough space for the full text. (3) Thanks, the hyphen seems to be more appropriate when it's used as an adjective so I added it.
8. Generally agree, but only if it's absolutely required to understand how to use the app. That's not the case here.
And finally, I really appreciate your feedback, it's useful to me whether you like the app or not :)
* it would be great to be able to submit comment,
* I use "collapse thread" quite often so it would be beneficial to do it in one tap.
Overall good design and better than other, probably abandoned clients for WP8. Keep up the good work!
Voting and commenting is definitely planned, however I'm waiting on the API to add support for authentication first. The app actually does not use the API since it's somewhat lacking right now [1] so it scrapes the markup instead, but I'm not quite comfortable with implementing login/voting/commenting by scraping.
You can collapse comments by tapping anywhere outside the text area, i.e. on the author/time header or on the margins to the left and right. I'm sorry that's not obvious, I'll probably add a message explaining it in the next update.