One suggestion: make Readability the default option for the articles, with a link to the original article.
Hacker News for iPhone ($3) app is insanely great
21–30 of 32 posts
Re: Hacker News for iPhone ($3) app is insanely great
#22Well 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
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
#24It's a truly trivial amount of money, and if you'd otherwise like the application, not buying it because it's "too expensive" astounds me.
(I have no connection to this app, its author, or any iPhone authors for that matter)
Re: Hacker News for iPhone ($3) app is insanely great
#25I 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
Since the iPhone app is written in Objective C, which isn't an option on the web, his choice of Flash for the demo really doesn't tell us anything about how good the app might be, does it?
Re: Hacker News for iPhone ($3) app is insanely great
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)
Does anyone else see some but not all comments in tiny text sizes for no obvious reason, on iPhone?
Re: Hacker News for iPhone ($3) app is insanely great
#27Insanely great? These Jobsian adjectives have suffered an inflation of Zimbabwean proportions.
Re: Hacker News for iPhone ($3) app is insanely great
#28With 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 i…
That's precisely why people are willing to buy an app like this: to improve the experience. Yes, "fixing" HN is easy, if you're pg. If you're just a reader, something like this offers a fix today, for three dollars.
(I agree with you, by the way: I won't pay money for a glorified web browsing app. Just pointing out that I think there's a place for apps like these, if only as a means of pointing out to site owners what they could improve.)
Re: Hacker News for iPhone ($3) app is insanely great
#29Insanely great? These Jobsian adjectives have suffered an inflation of Zimbabwean proportions.
Re: Hacker News for iPhone ($3) app is insanely great
#30With 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 i…
"Admittedly, using Hacker News on an iPhone is not the best mobile browser experience" That's precisely why people are willing to buy an app like this: to improve the experience. Yes, "fixing" HN is easy, if you're pg. If you're just a reader, something like this offers a fix today, for three dollars. (I agree with you, by the way: I won't pay money for a glorified web browsing app. Just pointing out that I think the…
In the case of HN there actually has been another reader that fixed the mobile experience for free (as mentioned in trimski's comment): http://toadjaw.com/hn