A free Hacker News app for Android

http://ifdefined.com/blog/post/A-Hacker-News-app-for-Android.aspx

by ctrager • 16 years ago

33 25 16 years ago

ifdefined.com

It's in the Market. It's my first Android app, so I'd be grateful for feedback.

dejb• 16 years ago

Where is the App? How do I get it? One of those barcode things would be nice.

georgecmu• 16 years ago

as the article says, "Just search for Hacker News". There's a search bar in the Android Market app -- type it in there and press enter.

edit: I think it may only be available for Android 2.x systems, so if you have a G1 like me, you're out of luck

spuz• 16 years ago

Looks very nice, but where are the vote counts / buttons?

ctrager8• 16 years ago

Voting would require allowing you to login, a whole 'nother degree of difficulty, especially given the architecture of going thru the proxy at heroku.

If enough people seem to care, I might attempt supporting logging in. And charge 99 cents for it....

grinich• 16 years ago

This should be in the iPhone app soon.

gcb• 16 years ago

Why?

my not-as-smart nokia running opera mobile reads hacker news and I can even vote via ajax (sans page reload).

That said. Your app looks good.

notauser• 16 years ago

The real question is not why, but why not?

(I've been meaning to do this for a while but I'm still awaiting delivery of my round tuit, so thank you to the submitter.)

ctrager8• 16 years ago

On Android too, if you use the browser on Android, you can interact with Hacker News same as usual, login, vote, etc. But you'll find yourself zooming and panning a lot. The rest of this comment is off topic: Speaking of voting, here are two people asking about voting at Hacker News, but yesterday was an election in Illinois with Obama's old senate seat at stake, and not one of about two dozen co-workers I talked to bothered to vote. There's more interest in voting for a Hacker News article than for a US Senator?

portman• 16 years ago

Fantastic! HN does not scale well at all to the Droid/Nexus resolutions. Thanks for doing this.

Maybe I'm the only one, but I much prefer reading black text on a white background. The inverted color scheme is hard on my eyes.

ctrager8• 16 years ago

According to the following the white-on-black display uses less power. Also, I found that once I altered a little bit of the default color scheme I had to alter ALL of it somehow, like changing the background and text color would mess up the border and highlighting color. It's an area where I need to do some more learning.

http://blog.javia.org/nexus-one-display-and-subpixel-pattern...

TobiasCassell4• 16 years ago

A misleading title, a shameful tease.

Not available for HTC G1. I believe most Android phones out there in the wild are 1st generation, be sure to let us know when you release a version for us early adopter-types..

(Edit) I didn't intend to sound so snarky here, I just really wanted your app, its very beautiful.. Thank you for building it.

ctrager8• 16 years ago

Ok. Maybe even tonight.

TobiasCassell4• 16 years ago

Thank you, you are speedy.. I bookmarked your homepage and I'll keep checking.

Calamitous• 16 years ago

Oh good. There was still a little time left in my day that wasn't being sucked away by Hacker News.

That takes care of that!

johnwatson11218• 16 years ago

Hacker News is one of the best looking sites on my G1.

For some reason I have never been able to post comments from the phone. I have to go pull up a full browser to post. Any ideas why? Is it just me?

joezydeco• 16 years ago

Logging in from a G1 is broken, I've seen the same thing.

nuclear_eclipse• 16 years ago

I can log in and post from both my G1 and my Nexus, but I run Cyanogen on my G1, if that makes any difference.

archon810• 16 years ago

An offtopic here, but I just wanted to say I was pleasantly surprised with how blazing fast your blog is (including leaving comments).

I was even more surprised when I saw what it was running on: http://www.dotnetblogengine.net (because I'd never heard of it and not because it's .NET - the speed actually makes sense now).

ctrager8• 16 years ago

I just uploaded a newer version to the market that should work with Android 1.6 (G1). However, I couldn't compile for 1.1 and 1.5. The compiler complained about my "res" folder. If folks want to point me in the right direction, how to learn more about this stuff, how to handle versioning with Android and the Market, I'm open.

ecaron• 16 years ago

Note to all Android app makers: Please include a QR code. If the Weather Channel is hip enough to show their QR code on-air (http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/03/weather-channel-distribut...), you can put your own on your website.

A free Hacker News app for Android

Related Stories