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Show HN: A free HN iPhone/iPad app I launched a few months ago

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Re: Show HN: A free HN iPhone/iPad app I launched a few months ago

#11

Post by marketer »

Jimmie wrote: post #8
marketer wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This type of app is not particularly monetizable. Most people would use the actual website instead of paying $0.99 cents for an app. Plus, it was a fun project to learn iOS and it costs me very little to host or maintain.

How hard was it to interface with HN? Do they provide an API to work with? Reddit has a very nice API, one of the killer features is that if you take any reddit page and add ".json" to the address it'll spit out pure json at you. For example: http://www.reddit.com/r/all becomes: http://www.reddit.com/r/all.json

Screen scraping. HN doesn't have a JSON feed, but it has fairly simple and predictable HTML.

Re: Show HN: A free HN iPhone/iPad app I launched a few months ago

#14

Post by marketer »

mutagen wrote: post #12

Thanks for the continued work on this, the navigation improvements are great. I'll join the choir of users asking for rotation support for the HN discussion. I can read the portrait view but at times the landscape magnification would be nice.

Yeah that view should rotate. It'll be in the next update.

Re: Show HN: A free HN iPhone/iPad app I launched a few months ago

#18

Post by runjake »

marketer wrote: post #7
pkamb wrote: post #3

Why is it free?

This type of app is not particularly monetizable. Most people would use the actual website instead of paying $0.99 cents for an app. Plus, it was a fun project to learn iOS and it costs me very little to host or maintain.

I paid 99 cents for news:yc for the iPhone.

Re: Show HN: A free HN iPhone/iPad app I launched a few months ago

#20

Post by runjake »

I'm using your app on the iPad. A few suggestions:

- Let me see my comment history & other people's replies.

- Get a new color scheme for the story list. It's very hard to read, maybe that's just my colorblindness. The colors don't go together well. They're too dark for my tastes. Use an app such as Instapaper or news:yc for examples of good color flow.

- List the number of comments for each story.

- Option for bigger text -- at least in the main story list view.

- Adjust the username/logout thingy in the upper right corner to something more elegant. How it currently works is wonky and reminds me of the worst examples of Android UX.

- Most importantly, charge for your app. 99 cents or 1.99 or whatever. You should gain from your work, however small. I'll be your first customer.

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