Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

itunes.apple.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 30 posts

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

#21

Post by duck »

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

There is an unofficial api at http://api.ihackernews.com/. It use to have a lot of timeout issues, but seems to be running a lot better now.

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

#22

Post by joelhooks »

runjake wrote: post #18
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.

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

I happily paid $4.99

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

#23

Post by wdewind »

runjake wrote: post #20

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 bigge…

As a counter point, I love the colors it makes it much easier on the eyes when I'm reading in bed. I wish the rest of the pages (comments etc.) would be like that as well.

And I too would buy your app if you started selling it.

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

#25

Post by yusefnapora »

I really enjoy your app; nice work! One thing that would greatly improve it for me is a button to switch between the article view and the comments. I usually want to read the comments directly after reading an article, and it's a bit annoying to have to go back to the article list. Not a deal-breaker, but it's something I've grown used to in Alien Blue (the reddit client) and I miss it when I use your app. Also, I was initially confused by the back button in the article view, as it is visible even when it's impossible to go back, so the button did nothing when I first pressed it. Once I followed a link in the article it was apparent what it was for. You can easily hide it based on the result of UIWebView's -[canGoBack] method. Anyway, thanks for the app!

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

#26

Post by joe_the_user »

marketer wrote: post #11
Jimmie wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How did you process the html?

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

#27

Post by joe_the_user »

duck wrote: post #21
Jimmie wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There is an unofficial api at http://api.ihackernews.com/ . It use to have a lot of timeout issues, but seems to be running a lot better now.

Having sampled it, I'm not sure of the value of a broken api that might improve later.

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

#28

Post by joe_the_user »

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

I'm playing with the Reddit api.

It works but what it gives you is complete dump of their page, 150K, say.

It would be nice to get just the tops of the comment trees instead. But hey, its there...

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

#29

Post by davidjade »

In general I like the app but the comment view text is too small for me on an iPhone/iPod. I also wish that the comment view would allow for rotation (as that usually increases the font size and improves readability of text layout). These issues caused me to ultimately switch to another HN app (but I still have yours installed in the hopes that this will change).

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

#30

Post by dustinrodrigues »

maxgaudin wrote: post #9

I've been using it for a while and love it. Thanks for the back button. Is it possible to integrate the Reader function of Safari in iOS or is that only possible within Safari? Also, I would pay for this especially given the other attempts at the same app.

I too am grateful for the back button update. The day before you released the update, I followed some links and wanted to go back, only to be taken to the front page of HN. Then I saw the update and it solved the exact problem I was having.
Post reply on HN