Show HN: Akepa – Our HN App

https://www.snappymob.com/blog/2015-05-14-akepa-has-landed/

by allending • 11 years ago

91 84 11 years ago

allending4• 11 years ago

Maker here. Just a fun note. One of the hardest parts about making the app was getting enough karma so we could test downvoting.

ohitsdom3• 11 years ago

What is that karma threshold? The site guidelines seem intentionally vague on this.

allending4• 11 years ago

500 \o/

SG-• 11 years ago

I'm hoping you didn't wait 2064 days to test the client :( Is this your first app? When did you settle on it and Swift? Are you using any Swift frameworks?

belltyler• 11 years ago

You can see at least some of the open source frameworks they've used in the app's Settings > About Us.

jfg• 11 years ago

Just downloaded, seems really polished and looks beautiful.

I'm currently a user of http://hn.premii.com, I'd make the switch to your app if you can get the 'yesterday's best' page, and an option to have readability mode on by default.

Very promising though, out of interest how long have you spent on the project?

taylorling8• 11 years ago

Hey,

Akepa designer here. Thanks a lot! We did put in quite some effort to ensure the 1.0 is polished enough to give the best reading experience that we wanted to deliver - it seems that we are able to put smile on some faces, which is pretty awesome!

Thanks for the suggestion - we will put the 'yesterday's best' page in the feature request list for prioritisation (I can assure you there are tons of interesting features planned for the next few releases). As for readability mode by default, sure thing! That's something we wanted to do but we decided to leave it out from our MVP, so yeah, upcoming release should have it.

We are a team of 5, and we roughly spent about 4 months for project planning, design and development.

Don't hesitate to let us know if you have some idea how we can further improve the HN experience :)

zolokar• 11 years ago

Wow, that's a great looking webapp.

captn3m0• 11 years ago

Its not just on web, it is available on both iOS and Android and works quite well on all 3 platforms.

mercer• 11 years ago

I also use hn.premii.com and the only thing I miss is the ability to see the new comments since last visit marked (which the HN enhancements suite does on my laptop). I'd switch my laptop browsing interface to hn.premii.com as well if it supported this.

ljk2• 11 years ago

looks like the icon is morse code for "akepa"

hnyc• 11 years ago

Indeed. And apparently

  ʻAkepa is a Hawaiian term meaning "agile"

According to Wikipedia.

toomuchtodo2• 11 years ago

Just attempted to go Pro ($5? Of course! Quality work should be rewarded). As soon as the purchase was complete, the app said it couldn't verify the purchase and to try again at a later time.

allending4• 11 years ago

Thanks toomuchtodo. We're hotfixing this right now. Receipt validation issues.

taylorling8• 11 years ago

Hey,

Thanks for the report! We are going for a quick fix now, something on the validation server :P

Thanks for the support!

toomuchtodo2• 11 years ago

Thank you!

guilamu• 11 years ago

Android?

danmaz742• 11 years ago

They lost us...

taylorling8• 11 years ago

Trust me (and us), we wanted to make the best HN reading experience on Android devices as well, but we are totally short of hands, therefore iOS for now.

thekingshorses• 11 years ago

Not everyone ignores alternate platforms.

Try https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.premii.hn

And if you hate downloading, try http://hn.premii.com/ in chrome and add it to home screen

huangc10• 11 years ago

Looks really clean, beautiful, well thought out and designed. Keep up the good work!

minimaxir• 11 years ago

Since the official API (https://github.com/HackerNews/API) does not support authentication, how are you collecting and storing auth credentials for login/posting?

allending4• 11 years ago

We don't store credentials within the app. When you login, we just keep the (long lived) auth cookie provided by HN if login succeeded and reuse it in the future when posting.

spiffyman• 11 years ago

Looks great. One thing I loved about HackerNode was the fact that I could send an article to Chrome. (Maybe I'm blind, but I can't figure out how to add Chrome to the iOS 8 activities sheet.) The in-app browser is nice, but this is an important feature for history-diving purposes. I'm sure lots of your target market don't use Safari on the desktop. Any plans to support it?

taylorling8• 11 years ago

Nah, you are not blind, I can't figure that out either. we will put the suggested feature (share to chrome) in the list, if it's not too tricky, likely it will be there in the next version since it's something affecting the HN consumption experience :)

stephenr• 11 years ago

Isn't this explicitly a chrome issue? My understanding is that apps need to "advertise" themselves to appear in a share sheet, so they appear as an option for the user?

lobster_johnson5• 11 years ago

Congrats, seems to work pretty well. I can tell you why I won't be switching away from Minihack [1], though.

First, apparently there is no collapsing support. Secondly, and more importantly, that default font. Not a fan. It's super thin, tiny, and you can't adjust the text size. Apparently there are "pro" themes, but you force the user to buy without giving a preview of what you'll be getting. Thirdly, no night mode; Minihack's is really pleasant.

[1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/minihack-for-hacker-news/id6...

ehmorris• 11 years ago

Agreed. I'd pay for pro if one of the themes was "larger font size, higher contrast."

taylorling8• 11 years ago

We are taking the reading experience very seriously and thus, dynamic type is definitely in the pipeline.

As for higher contrast theme, one of the theme in Pro version (the Robin) is specifically made for that people who prefer high contrast reading experience.

BinaryIdiot• 11 years ago

MiniHack is my go-to as well; it's really well done and it's hard to see me moving off of it any time soon.

wanda• 11 years ago

I agree with this chap. The font is... okay. But I'd like the option for something a little less whimsical. Something boring like Cousine would be nice.

Really solid app though, very fine work. First time an app has actually tempted me away from simply visiting website.

andrewksl5• 11 years ago

Thanks for your comments.

Dynamic type is very high on the to-do list. Akepa is a news/text reader first, and we recognize that comfortable reading is the highest priority.

Some of what you're asking for might be solved by the themes we have. We hear you on not being able to see what you're getting, though.

lobster_johnson5• 11 years ago

Another feature I love about Minihack: The split screen view. When on an iPad, that exploits landscape orientation very nicely.

alexggordon4• 11 years ago

To be honest, I didn't know you could collapse comments. Since there's not a way to "discover" it in the UI, I figured that it didn't exist. While I'm not sure of the implementation, I think it would be a benefit to the end users to show off that feature better in the UI.

lobster_johnson5• 11 years ago

To be fair, swiping is fairly common in iOS apps. Mail and Reeder come to mind. When I try out a new app I usually test to see if UI elements support gestures like these.

Showing some kind of button defeats the utility somewhat, and I think a help pane explaining available gestures would be a better solution. You could stick it in the preferences view.

spdustin2• 11 years ago

How do you reply to comments? When I do it, (by tapping) I see various options, including "collapse to root".

The swiping thing mentioned by one of my sibling comments was new to me, though. Handy.

ljk2• 11 years ago

as someone who knows nothing about apps, how can someone make an app for hn and charge for the app? does hn get a cut of that?

jordanlev• 11 years ago

Love it, nice work!

Feature request: be able to collapse comment threads (on the AlienBlue reddit app it's swipe left to collapse, swipe right to re-expand, but any mechanism would be greatly appreciated).

Another very minor (and AlienBlue-inspired) request: since you can swipe left from a comment page to go back to the article, it would make sense to be able to swipe right to navigate from the article over to the comment thread.

Thanks for putting this fantastic app out there, best of luck!

ohitsdom3• 11 years ago

I would absolutely pay for collapsible comment threads. I hate comment systems that don't allow it, and it's one of the reasons I love Disqus. While we're requesting features, can HN add this to the site?

ibejoeb• 11 years ago

You can use HNES (https://github.com/etcet/HNES) for Chrome to get collapsible comments. You can also use my fork (https://github.com/ibejoeb/HNES) to try some enhancements to the collapsible comments, which does persistent collapses and new comment indicators on the parent thread.

weinzierl• 11 years ago

It's great to see another app for HN that allows posting.

I used to use Hacker News (YC) by Dharmesh Patel and was very happy with it but it is read only. I tried news:yc which claims to support posting but that never worked. I submitted a bug report but never heard back.

I use MiniHack by Cai GuangShao for reading, voting and posting now. It works really well and I'm very happy with it. A while ago I reported a small bug and it was fixed immediately.

What can I do with Akepa that I can't do with MiniHack? Why should I switch?

whiteisblack• 11 years ago

There is a cool little stuff when you login into hn, it has 1password support.

OhHeyItsE• 11 years ago

http://hackerwebapp.com/

nwienert• 11 years ago

Built one with reapp at: http://hn.reapp.io/

ctekin• 11 years ago

For those of you not on iOS 8 like me, here's another nice client : https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hacker-news-yc/id713733435?m...

ebabchick• 11 years ago

I would pay for this if it came with a browser plugin that synced my already-viewed links between devices

technologia• 11 years ago

I like the work, but whats up with the taste analogies in your app's description (i.e. Delicious UI)?

DAddYE• 11 years ago

Finally!!!! Thanks for this!!! Just downloaded and purchased the pro!

eps• 11 years ago

Excellent, excellent. Does it phone home?

That is, does it connect strictly to the HN and only websites explicitly opened by the user? Or does it talk to something else on the Internet behind user's back?

andrewksl5• 11 years ago

We contact our servers only to verify receipts when you buy Pro (had some issues with that earlier :$). We also use analytics for crash reports.

Everything else is either direct to https://news.ycombinator.com or https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com (the official API). And, of course, sites explicitly opened by the user.

Edit: We also use the readability API for reading mode. https://www.readability.com/

raymondgh• 11 years ago

Nice app. Personally, I am pretty happy with yohackernews for mobile. One thing I'd like to know more about though is Akepa's icon / logo. It's very cool. I would love to read about your design process & ideation.

taylorling8• 11 years ago

Thanks for your love towards the Akepa logo ;)

I will see if I can do some write ups on the design process for the app, which can be interesting (or boring) I think.

But hey, thanks again!

Matt3o12_4• 11 years ago

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.

andrewksl5• 11 years ago

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.

Matt3o12_4• 11 years ago

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.

lobster_johnson5• 11 years ago

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.

Matt3o12_4• 11 years ago

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.

dirtybirdnj• 11 years ago

Looks beautiful, disappointed it's iOS focused and there's no Android version.

Either way, good job.

iambot• 11 years ago

Just paid for pro, and up voting/ commenting from inside. I don't even care if I'm giving you my authentication creds. So gud!

hit8run• 11 years ago

It would be sufficient if HN finally added responsive CSS. Grant me access and I do it for you.

fullstackdave2• 11 years ago

Sold. iOS dev myself, and I love the interactions. Commenting with the app now.

First feature request: enable readability by default in settings.

Cheers!

fullstackdave2• 11 years ago

Also, weird side note: when enabling readability on this post, you get an error.

mrmondo2• 11 years ago

This is really beautiful - you should be proud of your work!

Feature request: please let me make the font smaller (and perhaps change the typeface?).

mrmondo2• 11 years ago

Question: how do you get to a list of your comments / submissions?

taylorling8• 11 years ago

Not yet in our 1.0 (which is our MVP), but I can assure you it is in the pipeline :)

verelo• 11 years ago

I have used HackerNode for the longest time. It has some weird UI elements but for some reason I like the way it uses the screen space, all the other seem to involve a lot of scrolling (more than I personally want)

Sadly recently HackerNode's comment section broke and none of the ASK HN type posts render any more. So I guess what I'm saying is, I'll give it a go :-)

taylorling8• 11 years ago

Definitely give it a try and let us know what you think :)

leesalminen• 11 years ago

Found a bug in the app that allowed me to get the pro version without paying. Email is in my profile if you want to chat. Would prefer to not make it public info :)

alexyoung• 11 years ago

I like the app: the UI is amazing! I hope to see some technical posts about Swift on the Snappymob blog.

I have a small suggestion. I think the homepage copy would work better if you edited some of the clichés: "Make the app your own" and "Let Your Voice Be Heard" could be improved, for example.

Show HN: Akepa – Our HN App

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