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A better mobile version of HN. Please review my weekend project

toadjaw.com

11–20 of 53 posts

Re: A better mobile version of HN. Please review my weekend project

#11
post #3

http://www.icombinator.net/ I really wish there was a way to comment and vote from the interface, though.

I really like icombinator but I wanted to address some problems and add new features (View the article text, collapse/expand comments, and return to the previous position when using the browsers back button).

Re: A better mobile version of HN. Please review my weekend project

#15
For some reason I can not zoom on that page on my Nexus One. Is that intentional, and how is it done? I can zoom on other web sites.

I guess links could be bigger - I tend to zoom on web sites to hit the smaller links, and since it is not possible on your page, it might become an issue.

Re: A better mobile version of HN. Please review my weekend project

#17
post #13

The 'Article Text' is incredibly useful on old mobiles and slow connections. I will now be able to read actual articles, not just HN comments. Thank you!

You're welcome. I'm happy to hear that it's useful.

I'm actually using that for a bigger project that I'm working on. While working on it, and having done so HTML processing with it, I realized that it wouldn't take me to long to wire up a mobile version of HN that uses it.

You can pass any URL through it on this form: http://toadjaw.com/article

Re: A better mobile version of HN. Please review my weekend project

#18
post #14

Bookmarked. It is now possible to click the comments link on an iPad without missing 70% of the time. Edit: forget it. The links are target="_blank".

I just removed it. I was wondering if that would turn people off. Thanks for the feedback. Now that you mention it, I really don't like links opening in a new window/tab either.

Re: A better mobile version of HN. Please review my weekend project

#19
post #15

For some reason I can not zoom on that page on my Nexus One. Is that intentional, and how is it done? I can zoom on other web sites. I guess links could be bigger - I tend to zoom on web sites to hit the smaller links, and since it is not possible on your page, it might become an issue.

On the iPhone, and I think also on Android devices, you can prevent a page from being zoomed withe the following meta tag :

But this tag isn't being used here, as far I can see.

Re: A better mobile version of HN. Please review my weekend project

#20
post #16

Thank you! I've been using iCombinator but half the time I get a Python exception when loading comments. Hope this will work better. Cheers.

Yes that was some frustration with me too. I do this: if the connection times out (10 seconds) while reading HN, it'll serve the last successful scrape of HN. That's the reason I put the last fetched date on the page, I don't want anybody to be worried that they are receiving a stale version.

The comment pages don't yet serve cached pages if the fetch fails... working on that.

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