Comment by Matt3o12_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Matt3o12_ | Hacker News Reader

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.

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