Show HN: Augmented Hacker News Reader

Came here to echo this since Firefox Focus is my main browser on iOS. When I turn off protection, it shows a hamburger menu and some sliding menus. I still don’t see any content (except for a heading).

siddienahar• 6 years ago

I appreciate original version of HN more. As compared to other content platforms, I come to HN to actually read and just not to scroll. From that pov, I like text better than other elements visible to me. More than that, the current design took too much space, showing 1 post per scroll.

One suggestion for your website is to accommodate heading on left half of the screen (desktop view) coz usually most of the people have a mental model of trying to find heading first and reading from L2R.

pjc50• 6 years ago

Wow, yes - the main thing this design achieves is waste 90% of the space.

Sometimes I'd appreciate a larger font on mobile. I don't want larger margins!

LargoLasskhyfv• 6 years ago

I tend to agree about the waste of space, but using it on the desktop it's good for discoverability by lazy scrolling, I think.

At least I discovered many articles that way, lazily switching categories, which I'd have missed otherwise.

There are other HN-frontends which do similar things, but with the exception of [1] https://hckrnews.com/ none stuck with me so far.

This one I liked, bookmarked, and intend to use more often until further notice.

edit: What is missing for me is the ability of simple "click-through" to the original HN for voting/commenting without having to give my user/password to another site. That won't happen!

piccogabriele4• 6 years ago

Thanks for the feedback. User/password are not sent anywhere, you can inspect the login function here: https://github.com/GabrielePicco/hacker-news-rich/blob/maste...

disqard• 6 years ago

Thank you for making and sharing! I hope this was an educational endeavor. Whatever feedback you receive here, remember to think of it as suggestions that only you can interpret and assimilate.

varbhat• 6 years ago

I feel this site little bloated with unnecessary animations (i don't like animations much). It's okayish otherwise.

I also appreciate lightweight,page-like nature of original version of HN.

SilasX• 6 years ago

And a fixed floating header. Those need to die in a fire. Does no one even look at their sites in mobile landscape?

keenmaster• 6 years ago

Try this. Load up your website on a phone and then scroll down quickly. The header jarringly reloads and there’s an animation for every single post. Bare HN is faster and cleaner. I’m sure you can tweak your website to make it better in some contexts/for some people though. The pictures for each article are an example of that.

cvhashim• 6 years ago

Interesting

Vaslo• 6 years ago

Very cool but agree with others, sliding down seamlessly preferred to that popping animation currently there

AlexDanger• 6 years ago

Well done for taking the effort to create this site, it contains some impressive stylistic elements. Keep building things!

I prefer reading the original HN site because it loads fast, allows you to quickly scan topic titles, doesnt waste space in the layout, and has no animated elements that detract from the content.

dreamer7• 6 years ago

Attempts like these are really valuable to show how efficient the original HN site design is. No distractions. Just the content.

sharken• 6 years ago

Quite, just looked at Slashdot.org which I used a lot before discovering Hacker News and would add the lack of ads and a long title as killer features on HN. And the great discussions obviously.

But good effort still.

Brosper• 6 years ago

Looks nice, I would just make animations faster.

Santosh83• 6 years ago

Great work! Just one request which I haven't managed to find in any other app/site wrapper for HN... please highlight or otherwise mark new comments in a thread, or an ability to sort by 'new' like Reddit. It becomes too tedious and antiquated to scroll through the whole page every single time I want to read only fresh comments. I can't think why HN won't implement this, but it is a good opportunity for wrappers like yours to do so!

eulenteufel• 6 years ago

The only thing that I found this reader did better was clearly indicating the reply level in the discussion of articles. Does anybody know if there is a simple css fix for that?

acqq• 6 years ago

I really like the attempt to show the pictures, where available. Doing a fast glimpse is still much faster than reading the titles, especially when checking if one is already familiar with some article.

I've also observed that for those articles where the pictures haven't been found, a "random" picture is worse than no picture for me, confusing me.

(There are a lot of too harsh critiques here. I hope you aren't going to be demotivated, but just recognize that the expectations of different people are completely different).

vms20591• 6 years ago

A nice try, but I think I'll stick to the current minimalist design without the scroll.

kiviuq• 6 years ago

yeah too much visual clutter and what wrong with fixed headers?

el_don_almighty• 6 years ago

The market decides if this new interface exceeds the expectations of users. This is how unregulated capitalism works. Someone with a unique perspective identifies a potential opportunity for competition in the UX space for HN and creates something better. If their understanding of the marketplace needs is more accurate, and their solution better solves those issues, then users move to that interface.

IMHO, I don't think this is the case for HN users, but the the new layout would improve advertising accessibility for future revenue opportunities if someone was so inclined. However, I suspect the integration of graphical elements and advertising would NOT meet HN user needs having well established that HN users eschew exactly these elements of traditional web media.

But I don't get to decide, the market does. I get to watch, and tug at my beard and wonder at the results over time.

hellofunk• 6 years ago

I guess I’ll cast my contrarian vote to say I might start using this for a while as my first look at the HN front page. I like seeing snippets of the article before clicking through to read it. In fact, I like that idea so much, I think a site that cached quite a bit more of the article so I could just read all the front page articles in a row would be pretty rad.

rohan1024• 6 years ago

Is this built in Flutter?

piccogabriele4• 6 years ago

Angular, if you are interested in the architecture: https://medium.com/@PiccoGabriele/creating-and-hosting-an-ha...

silicon2401• 6 years ago

After a quick check, I still prefer hckrnews.com most. It's the cleanest, quickest, and simplest interface imho and works perfectly for me. Sharing here in case somebody else benefits from the site as I have.

savolai• 6 years ago

Love the liveliness. The animations get jarring fast tho.

ellsthrow• 6 years ago

I'm interested to know how login/auth support is working, where are the credentials stored?

piccogabriele4• 6 years ago

They are just cached in an encrypted token in your browser, not sent to any server. You can have a look in the source code if you are interested: https://github.com/GabrielePicco/hacker-news-rich

piccogabriele4• 6 years ago

Here a very simple explanation of the architecture: https://medium.com/@PiccoGabriele/creating-and-hosting-an-ha...

Show HN: Augmented Hacker News Reader

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