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Comment by lobster_johnson | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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