Read your Hacker News in Tile Style

http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/en-us/app/hackernews-reader/ae66a0ea-c66d-42cc-a58b-44799e2eb2fa

by queryly • 14 years ago

49 53 14 years ago

apps.microsoft.com

rikacomet• 14 years ago

I hope it is not buggy, but nice one!

revisionzero9• 14 years ago

Dev Here: It should be bug free! Always looking for ways to improve though. Any feedback is greatly appreciated.

jordan_clark• 14 years ago

Looks nice. Any plans for other platforms?

LaserChicken• 14 years ago

I really like the app so far! Great work! I did find a couple bugs though:

1) You probably shouldn't use the same bar to split the article and comments that Windows uses to resize pinned applications. This makes it look resizable when it's not.

2) Sometimes my mouse's scroll wheel stops scrolling. I think this has something to do with the ad reloading. I don't know if you have any control over that, but I found it annoying. I think the ad is stealing focus.

3) The ad on the main page stays on top of the Settings flyout (Win+I -> Settings)

4) Right-clicking on the article side (the web control) causes the appbar to fly in and then immediately disappear. The article also flickers. This does not repro when right-clicking on the comment side.

Most of these are ad related, so maybe that's my cue to buy it... Otherwise, great app! I like it.

kefs• 14 years ago

Why does the 'App Website' link take me to a prelaunch/landing page for something completely different?

revisionzero9• 14 years ago

Our company is 'Quixby', so the app website link is to that site as it's our main project currently. We don't have any dedicated app website is all, or we would link to that.

SilasX• 14 years ago

I thought paid advertisements on this site didn't allow a comment section?

Besides, I thought the whole point of the crappy site design was so that it would scare of people who either need eye can't or can't configure a browser to make it look different.

johnmurch• 14 years ago

Not specifically http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html but do agree - don't think it needs a upvote.

negrit4• 14 years ago

This is someone who likes hackernews who made an app, to bring it on windows 8 with a nice UX and he is asking for $1.49 which is not much at all...

What's wrong with that ?

Come on, give the guy a break and enjoy his good work.

EDIT: I don't know why I was thinking about windows mobile, my bad.

Tiopy• 14 years ago

Paid advertisement? I don't believe this falls into that category.

Seems like a fan of this Windows 8 app posted this.

negrit4• 14 years ago

i'd love to app a Chrome app like this one.

revisionzero9• 14 years ago

That's not a bad idea, will definitely look into that soon!

rednukleus2• 14 years ago

Looks great from the screenshot, I'll have to try this out later. The description doesn't state whether you can comment, post or vote from the app - I take it that's not possible?

revisionzero9• 14 years ago

Currently you cannot comment, post or vote from the app. It's possible, albeit more complicated. The problem is one of security, so we are taking a bit more time to ensure we do the commenting, posting and voting correctly.

This is something we will have in soon though!

biot• 14 years ago

Here's a suggestion: make the app free for anonymous use. When you get the login, voting, etc. working correctly have an in-app purchase to enable the logged-in features. This way you can build a larger initial base of users and later on upsell them to functionality worth paying for.

rednukleus2• 14 years ago

Great, good luck with it!

jeremyarussell2• 14 years ago

I second biot's idea. I'll buy it right now though since I want to see it go further and you need money for that. Might I suggest for the time being adding in a right click and "open in browser" that leads to the comment page for the article? That ways it's at least a quick one step to get where you need to be in order to comment and upvote.

sageikosa• 14 years ago

Will it work with Windows 9?

revisionzero9• 14 years ago

Well we tested it on Windows ME, so Windows 9 should be a cakewalk.

johnsea5• 14 years ago

US $ 1.49 to access Hacker News content through an app?!

This should be open source and free.

andrewcooke• 14 years ago

cool; please post here when you're done.

johnsea5• 14 years ago

browser is fine, thanks; yeah, cool, take other people's content and monetize...

jeremyarussell2• 14 years ago

Why exactly should it be free and open source? Because last time I checked hacker news isn't specifically free or open source, it's news for hackers, and it's parent company (ycombinator) tailors itself to startups and investors. Both of which want to make money, so I'm not really getting how you came to your conclusion. I for one don't mind paying $1.49 for an app, I just spent 5 dollars on coffee...

johnsea5• 14 years ago

I can't give a real argument. It would be more out of respect to the content which originates from other people and quite often deals in topic which are open/free. But 1.49 is not much and if it helps the dev...

yitchelle2• 14 years ago

I don't mind that the dude is charging $1.49 for his efforts, but the code should be open sourced!

heyitsnick2• 14 years ago

Why?

guiambros• 14 years ago

Would you do something with it, if it was open source? I can't understand people begging to have everything open sourced, but unwilling to dedicate time to write a single line of code (or patches, or testing, or documentation).

Yes, it's okay for developers to invest their own time to develop something, and try to recover their costs by selling it. And it's also ok if they decide to keep it closed source, because probably no one would bother to help. Just vote with your money.

(posted using news:yc on iOS, that I paid $2.99. And it's open source btw).

rckrd• 14 years ago

Just from a UX perspective, I wonder what seems like a more natural ordering:

  [ 1 2 ]
  [ 3 4 ]

Is more natural to read than:

  [ 1 3 ]
  [ 2 4 ]

I would think that since we read from left to right and then down, that the standard matrix ordering row, then column, might be more preferable.

Yet, horizontal scroll plays a larger role in metro, so this might not be a bad idea. I'd love to hear from someone who knows anything about UX in regards to this sort of thing.

jacalata2• 14 years ago

However you can see that this app, in fairly typical Metro style, scrolls across to the right. I can't think of any nice ordering horizontally that allows for that without constraining you to individual screens, like

[1 2 5 6 ] [3 4 7 8]

tsunamifury• 14 years ago

This is, in my opinion, the single largest problem with tile matrices that have unrestricted length and width. Its very hard to tailor the reading experience to be anything better than mediocre -- and at times on short, wide screens, its downright awful. Windows 8 makes a mess of things by scrolling sideways in landscape mode, then up and down in portrait mode. Readability is sacrificed at the alter of adaptable design. The tiles lead the eyes no where -- because content can really go in any direction (up down left right? why not down through 3D or even up or spinning maybe too? They are all done in Windows 8)

The other thing tiles do poorly is constrain the variances on line lengths by boxing them in. When you scan headlines, you naturally grip the page using the various headline lengths. Boxing them in and cutting them off makes every headline appear the same length and kills their distinguishability (and implied reading direction).

Ultimately, I believe its most comfortable read across the most narrow dimension of a screen -- depending on orientation -- then scroll the opposite of the reading direction.

That being said, users will also tend towards their native reading direction (Japanese users will read down, English, readers across from left to right, Arabic from the right to left)

Discloser: Im a UX and UI designer who has worked on Windows 8, iOS, Android, and about 10 other operation systems. I have also designed mixed language or language-free interfaces to varying success.

dkarl• 14 years ago

As a user, scanning a 2D array of tiles feels like work. I think this might be part of the reason: if I don't remember how a particular app or page is laid out, I have to scan both ways and decide which way makes more sense.

Maybe a single convention could emerge per mobile platform, but across the entire web, I doubt it, and honestly, my biggest problem with 2D grids is that scanning every item systematically feel very unnatural, and I doubt I will ever break that habit. Decades of reading has led me to see me to see Roman text as coherent, directed strings, and lists also naturally elicit in-order scanning behavior for me, but 2D grids of squares or rectangles are used for things that require different scanning behavior. When I look at maps, board games, and color or fabric samples, for example, I tend to hop around looking for patterns among groups of tiles, combined with occasional breadth-first scanning outward from points. My first reaction to a 2D grid is never to systematically scan all individual items but to start jumping around impressionistically, and then to switch to a systematic scan if the impressionistic method fails. Naturally, switching provokes irritation, both at myself and at the situation.

I wonder if the experience is different for people who grew up reading Chinese.

queryly• 14 years ago

Is this possible to change to the scrolling direction to up and down only? It would then feel more like reading a newspaper and also work well with HN's scoring system.

gknoy2• 14 years ago

Given the way most things in Windows 8 scroll sideways rather than vertically (at least in the tile-based UI things like the store, or Netflix), having things ordered in columns rather than rows will be a more intuitive ordering of stories than orienting them in rows.

On a side note, I was dismayed to notice that the "App website" link led to Quixby's "coming soon" screen, which is probably not terribly helpful for users who might want to know more. However, this is fairly well mitigated by the excellent selection of screenshots showing different use cases. The only question I couldn't answer from reading the in-store details was whether it would allow me to log in and up-vote stories and comments, since I consider that an integral part of my usage of HN.

dhruvmittal• 14 years ago

I feel like the Tile Layout isn't the most useful thing for a site like Hacker News- perhaps if we had more images, I'd see it, but the Tile Layout turns our column of text into a wall of text.

Does anybody know if it handles opening links or comments?

thingsilearned• 14 years ago

Tile style seems to really de-emphasize the titles of the articles in favor of their score.

Emphasizing the score, especially with the ranking algorithm being so time based is fairly confusing. It seems like the number should be in order, but they of course aren't.

A fix may be as simple as changing the two greys, having the darker grey behind the article title, and the lighter one behind the number. Also, increasing the contrast in the title text would be great.

revisionzero9• 14 years ago

Good suggestions, will experiment a bit and see what we can do to improve it!

roc• 14 years ago

> "A fix may be as simple as changing the two greys"

You're drawn to 1. the contrast between the colors and 2. the visually-emphasized smaller box pulled 'on top' of the larger box of text.

Wwapping the greys would do nothing for the net contrast. If anything it'd exacerbate the effect by making the block of text darker and less noticeable. Lessening the difference between the two greys would cause them to blend more and take out some of the 'pop'.

But I think 2. is the bigger problem. You'd want to put the 'score' inside the larger box to de-emphasize that element.

Read your Hacker News in Tile Style

Related Stories