Show HN: Akepa – Our HN App | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Akepa – Our HN App

snappymob.com

91 pointsallending85 comments

Congrats, seems to work pretty well. I can tell you why I won't be switching away from Minihack [1], though.

First, apparently there is no collapsing support. Secondly, and more importantly, that default font. Not a fan. It's super thin, tiny, and you can't adjust the text size. Apparently there are "pro" themes, but you force the user to buy without giving a preview of what you'll be getting. Thirdly, no night mode; Minihack's is really pleasant.

[1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/minihack-for-hacker-news/id6...

Agreed. I'd pay for pro if one of the themes was "larger font size, higher contrast."

We are taking the reading experience very seriously and thus, dynamic type is definitely in the pipeline.

As for higher contrast theme, one of the theme in Pro version (the Robin) is specifically made for that people who prefer high contrast reading experience.

MiniHack is my go-to as well; it's really well done and it's hard to see me moving off of it any time soon.

I agree with this chap. The font is... okay. But I'd like the option for something a little less whimsical. Something boring like Cousine would be nice.

Really solid app though, very fine work. First time an app has actually tempted me away from simply visiting website.

Thanks for your comments.

Dynamic type is very high on the to-do list. Akepa is a news/text reader first, and we recognize that comfortable reading is the highest priority.

Some of what you're asking for might be solved by the themes we have. We hear you on not being able to see what you're getting, though.

Another feature I love about Minihack: The split screen view. When on an iPad, that exploits landscape orientation very nicely.

To be honest, I didn't know you could collapse comments. Since there's not a way to "discover" it in the UI, I figured that it didn't exist. While I'm not sure of the implementation, I think it would be a benefit to the end users to show off that feature better in the UI.

To be fair, swiping is fairly common in iOS apps. Mail and Reeder come to mind. When I try out a new app I usually test to see if UI elements support gestures like these.

Showing some kind of button defeats the utility somewhat, and I think a help pane explaining available gestures would be a better solution. You could stick it in the preferences view.

I agree with you that we've trained users to expect UITableView Cells to be swipeable, yet I'd argue that the comments on MiniHack don't fit into a "standard" UI for cells (they don't look like a table view cell from Mail and Reeder, especially since a cell can take up more than a screen of height).

As such, I wouldn't expect my users to know to swipe them. I do agree that a help pane would do the trick, but personally I would probably lean towards an AlienBlue type of indication that the "cell" is actionable (the triangle showing Compressed or Uncompressed, and a row of icons that appears when you tap the cell, instead of the popup from the bottom).

That said, a JazzHands[0] type tutorial would serve perfectly fine too!

[0] https://github.com/IFTTT/JazzHands

How do you reply to comments? When I do it, (by tapping) I see various options, including "collapse to root".

The swiping thing mentioned by one of my sibling comments was new to me, though. Handy.

You're on Minihack right? This is what mine[0] looks like.

[0] http://i.imgur.com/Tgaa1ep.jpg?1

From my profile -> comments page, yes, and that's a regression -- it used to include a link back to the post's full comments feed.

But from the full comment feed for a post, I have options for upvote, reply, profile, and collapse to root.

Gotchya. I was tapping the root comment, and not a child comment. I'm surprised there isn't a "collapse" button when tapping the root comment.

Usually I don't reply or comment to HN on my phone, which is probably why I hadn't seen it before.

as someone who knows nothing about apps, how can someone make an app for hn and charge for the app? does hn get a cut of that?

Maker here. Just a fun note. One of the hardest parts about making the app was getting enough karma so we could test downvoting.

What is that karma threshold? The site guidelines seem intentionally vague on this.

500 \o/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7606344

Wow. Pretty funny imagining a dev team on HN all day, writing insightful comments all in the name of testing.

I can personally guarantee you that comments don't have to be 'insightful' to get karma.

[5 - Funny]

I'm hoping you didn't wait 2064 days to test the client :( Is this your first app? When did you settle on it and Swift? Are you using any Swift frameworks?

You can see at least some of the open source frameworks they've used in the app's Settings > About Us.

Are you implying we don't attribute all the libraries we use? ;) Everything we use is there. We're not using any closed source frameworks.

Just downloaded, seems really polished and looks beautiful.

I'm currently a user of http://hn.premii.com, I'd make the switch to your app if you can get the 'yesterday's best' page, and an option to have readability mode on by default.

Very promising though, out of interest how long have you spent on the project?

Hey,

Akepa designer here. Thanks a lot! We did put in quite some effort to ensure the 1.0 is polished enough to give the best reading experience that we wanted to deliver - it seems that we are able to put smile on some faces, which is pretty awesome!

Thanks for the suggestion - we will put the 'yesterday's best' page in the feature request list for prioritisation (I can assure you there are tons of interesting features planned for the next few releases). As for readability mode by default, sure thing! That's something we wanted to do but we decided to leave it out from our MVP, so yeah, upcoming release should have it.

We are a team of 5, and we roughly spent about 4 months for project planning, design and development.

Don't hesitate to let us know if you have some idea how we can further improve the HN experience :)

Wow, that's a great looking webapp.

Its not just on web, it is available on both iOS and Android and works quite well on all 3 platforms.

I also use hn.premii.com and the only thing I miss is the ability to see the new comments since last visit marked (which the HN enhancements suite does on my laptop). I'd switch my laptop browsing interface to hn.premii.com as well if it supported this.

This app is really nice and well designed but I think I'll stick with "Hacker News (YC)" by Dharmesh Patel. Here is why:

- Your font looks really cool but I can't read it for a long period of time. Could you add an option to adjust the font size (I know I can change that in the iOS settings but when I do that, all the text is bigger and this distracts me. I only need big text for long reading sessions). Hacker News offers that in the settings.

- I really would like to test out your pro themes, but I don't want to pay the full price for testing it. How about you let us use all these themes for the top story (i.e. only for one story). If I like the themes, I'll buy pro because I want to have it for all stories. This is better then a preview text.

- I really like Hacker News' "Content read" (I don't know how to call it). Instead of opening the full HTML page, it only shows me the content of the page – without any distracting CSS fonts, ads, or banners that block the content. It is extremely helpful for pages that are not optimized for mobile and for pages that need 2 clicks to get to the content (for example github requires me to click "View all of README" although all I wanna do is read the readme. The HackerNews app takes care of that for me. It also loads the content when I'm in the underground train or in school incredible fast. I only have edge internet there and a full HTML page with all assets takes over a minute to load.

Hi there. We're going to take note of the first two points and see what we can do about it.

As for the third, have you tried reading mode? It's the armchair icon to the URL in the browser.

Hey, thanks!

As of the reading mode (that was the word I was looking for), Yes, I have heard about it. I use it when I load a webpage in Safari. Still, it is only available when the page finished loading. When I'm riding the train I have edge internet + heigh latency and package loss, loading a JS library (that almost every webpage has), is close to impossible. It takes ages and almost always times out. Since most of the time the <script> tags are in the header, the content won't be visible until the scripts are there. Maybe there is a library that does the job.

You should be able to enter reading mode before the page finishes (or even starts, for that matter) loading.

We use the readability (https://www.readability.com/) API, which does all scraping/parsing server-side.

Sorry, I didn't read the parent comment thoroughly enough. I though you meant the reading mode in safari.

Then, I suppose my third point is invalid :) Thank you very much :)

Have you tried Minihack? It has all of those features (including Instapaper "readability" integration). I used the Patel app for a long time, too, but it is not as good.

No I haven't because it is $3 and I don't want to spend "so much money" for an app, I might not end up using (just like all the other 1000 Hacker News apps that are out there). I might give it a shot, though, if you say it's worth the money.

IMHO it's the best HN client right now. It has some minor UI awkwardness (specifically, how you switch between the main UI and the "web view"), but nothing terrible. With things like thread collapsing and read tracking, it's definitely better than HN in a browser.

It's great to see another app for HN that allows posting.

I used to use Hacker News (YC) by Dharmesh Patel and was very happy with it but it is read only. I tried news:yc which claims to support posting but that never worked. I submitted a bug report but never heard back.

I use MiniHack by Cai GuangShao for reading, voting and posting now. It works really well and I'm very happy with it. A while ago I reported a small bug and it was fixed immediately.

What can I do with Akepa that I can't do with MiniHack? Why should I switch?

There is a cool little stuff when you login into hn, it has 1password support.

Since the official API (https://github.com/HackerNews/API) does not support authentication, how are you collecting and storing auth credentials for login/posting?

We don't store credentials within the app. When you login, we just keep the (long lived) auth cookie provided by HN if login succeeded and reuse it in the future when posting.

Love it, nice work!

Feature request: be able to collapse comment threads (on the AlienBlue reddit app it's swipe left to collapse, swipe right to re-expand, but any mechanism would be greatly appreciated).

Another very minor (and AlienBlue-inspired) request: since you can swipe left from a comment page to go back to the article, it would make sense to be able to swipe right to navigate from the article over to the comment thread.

Thanks for putting this fantastic app out there, best of luck!

I would absolutely pay for collapsible comment threads. I hate comment systems that don't allow it, and it's one of the reasons I love Disqus. While we're requesting features, can HN add this to the site?

You can use HNES (https://github.com/etcet/HNES) for Chrome to get collapsible comments. You can also use my fork (https://github.com/ibejoeb/HNES) to try some enhancements to the collapsible comments, which does persistent collapses and new comment indicators on the parent thread.

Found a bug in the app that allowed me to get the pro version without paying. Email is in my profile if you want to chat. Would prefer to not make it public info :)

http://hackerwebapp.com/

Built one with reapp at: http://hn.reapp.io/

Just attempted to go Pro ($5? Of course! Quality work should be rewarded). As soon as the purchase was complete, the app said it couldn't verify the purchase and to try again at a later time.

Thanks toomuchtodo. We're hotfixing this right now. Receipt validation issues.

Hey,

Thanks for the report! We are going for a quick fix now, something on the validation server :P

Thanks for the support!

Thank you!

Android?

They lost us...

Trust me (and us), we wanted to make the best HN reading experience on Android devices as well, but we are totally short of hands, therefore iOS for now.

I trust you, but the guy upstairs is right. You did kinda lose us.... There's a lot of "us".

I generally don't get excited about apps, but this one made me search for it.. too bad I was searching on the wrong store.

Well then I wish you'll have success enough to also port it to Android.

Not everyone ignores alternate platforms.

Try https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.premii.hn

And if you hate downloading, try http://hn.premii.com/ in chrome and add it to home screen

Excellent, excellent. Does it phone home?

That is, does it connect strictly to the HN and only websites explicitly opened by the user? Or does it talk to something else on the Internet behind user's back?

We contact our servers only to verify receipts when you buy Pro (had some issues with that earlier :$). We also use analytics for crash reports.

Everything else is either direct to https://news.ycombinator.com or https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com (the official API). And, of course, sites explicitly opened by the user.

Edit: We also use the readability API for reading mode. https://www.readability.com/

looks like the icon is morse code for "akepa"

Indeed. And apparently

  ʻAkepa is a Hawaiian term meaning "agile"

According to Wikipedia.

Looks great. One thing I loved about HackerNode was the fact that I could send an article to Chrome. (Maybe I'm blind, but I can't figure out how to add Chrome to the iOS 8 activities sheet.) The in-app browser is nice, but this is an important feature for history-diving purposes. I'm sure lots of your target market don't use Safari on the desktop. Any plans to support it?

Nah, you are not blind, I can't figure that out either. we will put the suggested feature (share to chrome) in the list, if it's not too tricky, likely it will be there in the next version since it's something affecting the HN consumption experience :)

Isn't this explicitly a chrome issue? My understanding is that apps need to "advertise" themselves to appear in a share sheet, so they appear as an option for the user?

I have used HackerNode for the longest time. It has some weird UI elements but for some reason I like the way it uses the screen space, all the other seem to involve a lot of scrolling (more than I personally want)

Sadly recently HackerNode's comment section broke and none of the ASK HN type posts render any more. So I guess what I'm saying is, I'll give it a go :-)

Definitely give it a try and let us know what you think :)

I like the app: the UI is amazing! I hope to see some technical posts about Swift on the Snappymob blog.

I have a small suggestion. I think the homepage copy would work better if you edited some of the clichés: "Make the app your own" and "Let Your Voice Be Heard" could be improved, for example.

For those of you not on iOS 8 like me, here's another nice client : https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hacker-news-yc/id713733435?m...

It would be sufficient if HN finally added responsive CSS. Grant me access and I do it for you.

Nice app. Personally, I am pretty happy with yohackernews for mobile. One thing I'd like to know more about though is Akepa's icon / logo. It's very cool. I would love to read about your design process & ideation.

Thanks for your love towards the Akepa logo ;)

I will see if I can do some write ups on the design process for the app, which can be interesting (or boring) I think.

But hey, thanks again!

Looks really clean, beautiful, well thought out and designed. Keep up the good work!

Just paid for pro, and up voting/ commenting from inside. I don't even care if I'm giving you my authentication creds. So gud!

This is really beautiful - you should be proud of your work!

Feature request: please let me make the font smaller (and perhaps change the typeface?).

Sold. iOS dev myself, and I love the interactions. Commenting with the app now.

First feature request: enable readability by default in settings.

Cheers!

Also, weird side note: when enabling readability on this post, you get an error.

I like the work, but whats up with the taste analogies in your app's description (i.e. Delicious UI)?

I would pay for this if it came with a browser plugin that synced my already-viewed links between devices

Looks beautiful, disappointed it's iOS focused and there's no Android version.

Either way, good job.

Question: how do you get to a list of your comments / submissions?

Not yet in our 1.0 (which is our MVP), but I can assure you it is in the pipeline :)

Finally!!!! Thanks for this!!! Just downloaded and purchased the pro!

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