HackerNews for iPhone out now

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hackernews-for-iphone/id642041103?ls=1&mt=8

9 8 13 years ago

itunes.apple.com

HackerNews for iPhone is a new client for HackerNews, with readability integration, read-later services and social sharing. At 69p (99 cents), it's less than your morning coffee, and you deserve that right?

jvzr• 13 years ago

Could you try and sell it a bit more energetically to us? In what grounds is it better than the myriad of other clients that came before? How is it better than news:yc app, which has been recognized as one of the best around and Open Source?

DanielTomlinson4• 13 years ago

It's a personal preference thing, personally, I felt that News:YC was kinda bloated when all I really wanted it for was reading. My app was built to be nice and simple, with a core feature set, News:YC does have benefits for some people, like the ability to post, not everyone wants to though.

evadne• 13 years ago

Congratulations on the App Store release. I’m assuming that we’re sharing a certain amount of vitriol regarding provisioning and code signing.

A few ideas that might be of your interest:

* Automatic text shrinking in UILabel is likely the numero uno bad feature put in place to encourage bad interface design. It makes font sizes inconsistent, it destroys visual rhythm, and it jags the lines. Try to implement variable height table views and be typographically consistent.

* UIActionSheet on iPhone should be presented from the bottom-most edge of the screen, not any random view, and not from the bottom of a view above the toolbar.

* The Comments view is using the grouped style with one cell per section. This is not a good idea because it simply introduces much more visual noise.

* Readability integration, read-later services and social sharing are all present in news:yc. They are not actually selling points when everybody can get it done practically in no time.

DanielTomlinson4• 13 years ago

Hey Evadne, The text shrinking was actually requested by 20 different beta testers, even though I initially hated the idea, and am looking at ways of improving it.

The UIActionSheet should come from the bottom, it's a bug I need to fix (that randomly came about as I deployed)

I accept the point on comments, I'm currently redesigning them for the next version.

As for readability/social etc, it's a useful feature, so why not include it as a bonus?

LordIllidan2• 13 years ago

Which api do you use to get this data? I'm curious about building an app (for learning purposes)

DanielTomlinson4• 13 years ago

I built a custom one in NodeJS as the existing ones aren't reliable enough. This is hosted on heroku, so I can scale as required.

LordIllidan2• 13 years ago

Are you scraping the site to build it?

HackerNews for iPhone out now

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