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Hacker News for iPhone ($3) app is insanely great

michaelgrinich.com

11–20 of 32 posts

Re: Hacker News for iPhone ($3) app is insanely great

#11

Well and why should I get this app? HN is a really lightweight webpage, which looks good even on mobile browsers. The app navigation is similiar to the browser nav and even commenting is similiar as within browser. so why spend $3 to have a bookmark of HN?

I prefer to use ToadJaw (http://toadjaw.com/hn), which was linked to on here recently.

EDIT: It was created by HN's own ronnier. http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ronnier

Re: Hacker News for iPhone ($3) app is insanely great

#12

Well and why should I get this app? HN is a really lightweight webpage, which looks good even on mobile browsers. The app navigation is similiar to the browser nav and even commenting is similiar as within browser. so why spend $3 to have a bookmark of HN?

HN _looks_ decent on mobile browsers, but doesn't handle all that well on them.

On iPhone: font sizes are really too small, voting arrows are practically not hittable without zooming in and trying to zoom in on the articles list confuses Safari (probably because of all the nested tables)

Re: Hacker News for iPhone ($3) app is insanely great

#14
post #12

Well and why should I get this app? HN is a really lightweight webpage, which looks good even on mobile browsers. The app navigation is similiar to the browser nav and even commenting is similiar as within browser. so why spend $3 to have a bookmark of HN?

HN _looks_ decent on mobile browsers, but doesn't handle all that well on them. On iPhone: font sizes are really too small, voting arrows are practically not hittable without zooming in and trying to zoom in on the articles list confuses Safari (probably because of all the nested tables)

On my Iphone browsing HN in landscape just needs one time zooming to become readable. I now switched to palm pre and there it is even much better in landscape, i dont need to zoom.

yes, its a personal feling. but i think one time zooming is ok and not worth buying an app.

Re: Hacker News for iPhone ($3) app is insanely great

#15
With the risk of sounding like a sour guy, I'm just going to say it: why do people pay money for apps that are essentially web browsers in a shiny package?

I am not against people making money by providing better access to content that is available for free (who hasn't paid for the odd Twitter app), but just take a look at the list of features on the app's promotion page:

  * View top submitted stories, optimized for iPhone
  * Explore comments and threads
  * Browse web links without quitting using the in-app browser
All of these things are true for browsing Hacker News in mobile Safari as well. That's hardly enough to earn the predicate "insanely great" or the $3 price tag in my world.

Admittedly, using Hacker News on an iPhone is not the best mobile browser experience (it could certainly use some css @media queries and perhaps a meta viewport tag, essentially few minutes of work would do the trick), but that hardly warrants a native app, especially if it's not free.

Re: Hacker News for iPhone ($3) app is insanely great

#19
I won't buy an iPhone app that's using Flash inside the phone screen to demo the app. Use of Flash suggests the author doesn't know how to do rich interfaces without Flash, so the app itself can't be that good.

Granted, if I could see the demo, I might discover I was mistaken.

http://imgur.com/VdUK2.png

Re: Hacker News for iPhone ($3) app is insanely great

#20
Insanely great if you ignore logging in with OpenID. Apparently I was the first person to ask for this, so chances of an implementation were low. Shame.

And yes, really HN just needs a mobile stylesheet. If I had time I’d make one, but at the moment I don’t :/

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