Haven’t tried it yet but the screen shot looks great. Clean, simple and not over engineered.
Show HN: I developed a native macOS Hacker News client
41–50 of 86 posts
Re: Show HN: I developed a native macOS Hacker News client
#42Hello, I’m the developer. Didn’t expect a Show HN post to go into a second—chance pool — I woke up an hour ago to find that my app was trending on HN.
I developed this b.c. I found that I didn’t like HN mixed with other work/school related tabs, and realized that a separate app would be great for me. I believe that apps should use the most native-like UI possible — especially Cocoa on macOS, so I aimed to be the most ‘Mac-assed’ HN client possible.
Unfortunately the current app is in fact pretty unpolished — it’s in a usable state, but there’s a lot of missing features that one would expect from a ‘full-featured’ HN client. Probably a bunch of unknown bugs as well :-(. I would very appreciate any suggestions on feature additions or simple bug reports. Thanks!
Re: Show HN: I developed a native macOS Hacker News client
#43This raises a question I've always wondered: How many of you prefer to run a native app rather than the web app? Personally I hate installing things on my desktop if there is a website because it is just another thing I have to manage. (Even more so because I have multiple Windows, Mac and Linux boxes I'm bouncing around between during the day and rather just have sync'd Firefox bookmarks than have to install s/w on…
Depends. Something I use all the time, like a music player or a chat app, I hate having to use a web app or a app that just wraps a web interface as they are usually slow, clunky, glitchy, power hungry and with non-standard interfaces especially things like keyboard shortcuts, drag n drop support. But something like this app I would probably never install as I don’t spend that much time writing stuff on HN. HN is just a website that links to other websites that I mostly just have a look once or twice a day for semi-obscure interesting science, tech and design news that hasn’t made it to ars technica or whatever.
Re: Show HN: I developed a native macOS Hacker News client
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Does the Algolia hackernews api ( the specific API this client uses ) still require you to query in a tree like fashion, every comment item id if you want an entire page of comments? I’m using two different APIs — the inefficient API that requires you querying in a tree fashion is the HN official API[0], but there’s also the Algolia API[1], which is much faster and gives a much sensible data shape. I also do actual…
Oh wow, I... really wish I'd known about that second API a while ago. I gave up on writing my own client because HN's API was so frustrating.
Unfortunately the second API is also a bit of a mess — the comment order is mixed up, so you have no option but to parse the HN HTML and sync the orders. I really wanted faster load speed (than slowly querying the tree-like API), so I did wrote that code…
Re: Show HN: I developed a native macOS Hacker News client
#45Very happy to see a "mac-assed" app! My only complaint so far is that I can only see about 12 items in the app on one screen, vs the whole front page in a browser. Adds a lot more scrolling.
I guess I’ll have to add a compact mode that hides some of the UI. Thanks for the idea!
Re: Show HN: I developed a native macOS Hacker News client
#46This raises a question I've always wondered: How many of you prefer to run a native app rather than the web app? Personally I hate installing things on my desktop if there is a website because it is just another thing I have to manage. (Even more so because I have multiple Windows, Mac and Linux boxes I'm bouncing around between during the day and rather just have sync'd Firefox bookmarks than have to install s/w on…
I use materialistic(on fdroid and gplay) because it gives me a phone home screen widget of top hn stories. https://f-droid.org/is/packages/io.github.hidroh.materialist...
This app is my 1st choice for HN engagement but could really use an update and a search function inside comments view.
It is has an infinite scroll system so there is no page1/2/3 etc and in the comments section this is especially useful. I used to wonder why Dang inserted the extra pages links at the top of high comment count posts and it is obviously a pain point for him. With this android app its just all there in a slick card presentation.
I think there are a lot of interesting ways to enhance our connection to HN's valuable store of knowledge...
Re: Show HN: I developed a native macOS Hacker News client
#47Hello, I’m the developer. Didn’t expect a Show HN post to go into a second—chance pool — I woke up an hour ago to find that my app was trending on HN. I developed this b.c. I found that I didn’t like HN mixed with other work/school related tabs, and realized that a separate app would be great for me. I believe that apps should use the most native-like UI possible — especially Cocoa on macOS, so I aimed to be the most…
Thanks for putting it together. I've been curious about modern macos development for a while, but haven't found many good resources on what that entails. In the past, I used BigNerdRanch's Cocoa book to put together a small UI that accessed an external service in ObjC, but that book hasn't received updates in a hell of a long time.
Re: Show HN: I developed a native macOS Hacker News client
#48Any chance for Mojave support? It currently requires Big Sur. Looks good on screenshots tho.
Unfortunately I’m not expecting to support anything lower than Big Sur. I tried supporting Catalina, and having to support an OS that I don’t use daily was hard… Sorry about that. :-(
Re: Show HN: I developed a native macOS Hacker News client
#49Thanks for sharing this. It looks really great and pretty minimal which I personally love. The main thing I'm missing from this would be read/unread indicators on stories. A roadmap of planned features would be nice or some tickets that other people could help with. I'm not sure how much time you plan on spending this, but I'd personally probably be willing to buy a version of this if it was able to do notifications…
For me, right now, this is a hobby project — until now, the feature roadmap was basically the feature that I have in mind. I’m more than happy to get feature requests though — read/unread indication and favorites are something that I would definitely try implementing. Notifications are a bit harder because it would require polling HN — I’ll be thinking on it.
I would love to see some user-related features a la Reddit Enhancement Suite.
Displaying the total number of times I've upvoted someone, a flair which I could put next to their user name, and, sad but true, being able to put a user in the block bin.
If I had those features I'd use this app in preference to the site.
Re: Show HN: I developed a native macOS Hacker News client
#50This raises a question I've always wondered: How many of you prefer to run a native app rather than the web app? Personally I hate installing things on my desktop if there is a website because it is just another thing I have to manage. (Even more so because I have multiple Windows, Mac and Linux boxes I'm bouncing around between during the day and rather just have sync'd Firefox bookmarks than have to install s/w on…
There's some things I prefer native apps for, others I prefer web for. But it's a highly personal choice, I think. For instance, for me, all web and social stuff is browser based, but I _loathe_ using chat or email in a browser. And until quite recently, I still used a desktop RSS reader just for headline aggregation, I finally gave up on that as another handful of sites I follow killed their RSS feeds.