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Two lines of CSS that will improve HN on mobile (IMO)

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151–160 of 163 posts

Re: Two lines of CSS that will improve HN on mobile (IMO)

#151

Hah! This is nothing compared to the “update” button being next to iOS Safari’s back button. Will I successfully update my prescient mumblings such that they actually make sense, or will I delete everything my fat fingers just spent hundreds of seconds editing? Who nose?! This is an specially irksome bug given that the two buttons are only next to each other for particularly long comments. I should cut back on the wa…

Does Safari not keep preserve the text when you press forward? I suppose that wouldn't help if you opened the comment page on a new tab, though.

Testing… it does!

Re: Two lines of CSS that will improve HN on mobile (IMO)

#152

Sometimes I wish the Apollo [0] app developer, Christian Selig, would create a HN app using the bones of the Apollo app but that would probably just increase my HN browsing time whereas now I normally only browse HN on desktop. [0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/apollo-for-reddit/id979274575

I have this exact sentiment. I wished for the same thing with Alien Blue when it was the king of 3rd party reddit apps.

I'm also using HACK (same as one of the other commenters in this thread), but it's not quite as nice as Apollo.

Re: Two lines of CSS that will improve HN on mobile (IMO)

#153

Sometimes I wish the Apollo [0] app developer, Christian Selig, would create a HN app using the bones of the Apollo app but that would probably just increase my HN browsing time whereas now I normally only browse HN on desktop. [0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/apollo-for-reddit/id979274575

I love Apollo! It’s the definitive Reddit experience for me. Do you know if HN or any third party provides an API so that devs can play around building mobile interfaces ?

Hacker news provides its own api, but it's not as easy to use as you would like.

https://github.com/HackerNews/API#design

Re: Two lines of CSS that will improve HN on mobile (IMO)

#154
post #67

What I really would like to have would be to collapse comment threads via a column that runs the length of the comment thread and is indented like its respective comment. This way I don't have to scroll to find the comment to collapse its thread, and clicking the column is easier. This is used in some subreddits in the old Reddit style, e.g. /r/de as can be seen here: https://old.reddit.com/r/de/comments/rcc9us/exper…

I created a quick UserScript that does just this. Hacked together but seems to work well. You can find it here [0][1] [0] https://gist.github.com/evanreichard/96d89512cbfe23e5d7a8147... [1] https://i.imgur.com/qGUltI8.png

I was going to ask how to install it but figured I should be able to figure it by myself. After a few web searches and reading this Hacker News discussion¹, I installed GreaseMonkey and it was super-easy from there.

Many thanks! It works like a charm.

¹ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22896078

Re: Two lines of CSS that will improve HN on mobile (IMO)

#155
post #152

Sometimes I wish the Apollo [0] app developer, Christian Selig, would create a HN app using the bones of the Apollo app but that would probably just increase my HN browsing time whereas now I normally only browse HN on desktop. [0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/apollo-for-reddit/id979274575

I have this exact sentiment. I wished for the same thing with Alien Blue when it was the king of 3rd party reddit apps. I'm also using HACK (same as one of the other commenters in this thread), but it's not quite as nice as Apollo.

Replying to you now from HACK. This will do but I’ll still pine for Apollo for HN.

Re: Two lines of CSS that will improve HN on mobile (IMO)

#156
post #44

I for one value the HN limited aesthetic. From a ui perspective its not ideal, but keeping the site extremely simple and a little coarse surely disincentivizes mass and mob adoption.

That's cool, but I hope you can also see that the user experience on mobile is pretty bad due to small icons and links.

Personally, I find the user experience on mobile is fantastic. The small icons and links mean that more content can fit on my tiny screen. This is without a doubt one of the main reasons HN is the most visited site on my phone.

(Not trying to start a debate. Just pointing out that user experience on mobile is subjective, rather than objectively "pretty bad".)

Re: Two lines of CSS that will improve HN on mobile (IMO)

#157
post #67

What I really would like to have would be to collapse comment threads via a column that runs the length of the comment thread and is indented like its respective comment. This way I don't have to scroll to find the comment to collapse its thread, and clicking the column is easier. This is used in some subreddits in the old Reddit style, e.g. /r/de as can be seen here: https://old.reddit.com/r/de/comments/rcc9us/exper…

I know I'm late to the party but this could do what you want: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/427429-hacker-news-context... (disclaimer, I made it)

Re: Two lines of CSS that will improve HN on mobile (IMO)

#158

See, I would have just put that in a userstyle (yes, I have Stylus on mobile) rather than write a blog post about it. But I'm grateful for the blog post...now I can put those lines in my userstyle.

Custom user styles might work on Chrome, but on Firefox mobile, it's an atrocious experience. You need to install the nightly version, set some hidden developer flags, create a addon collection with your user account on addons.mozilla.org and type the collection ID in the settings of your mobile browser.

In other words, you can't really do it.

Re: Two lines of CSS that will improve HN on mobile (IMO)

#159
Not sure where I read this, but there are few features that are undocumented on the website probably! But some of them are mentioned here: https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented

One of the few issues that I've faced is pagination of the comments and occasionally "dang" might pop up to paginate the comments on heavily trending/debated topics.

My 2 cents would be to enable pagination after a set number of comments, so that it doesn't go on and on, on mobiles.

BTW, I really like this kind of website design as its minimal enough to load on terrible connections and easily viewable.

Re: Two lines of CSS that will improve HN on mobile (IMO)

#160
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not on comments, it just says "unvote" which is extremely unhelpful.

I just downvoted your comment and it says "undown".

Oh how strange, perhaps I thought I'd downvoted something by accident and actually hadn't. Either way, the arrows are too damn close and small.
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