I think one improvement you can make in this design is to make it easy to distinguish different types of posts. There are posts that are news, some are blog posts, some are showcases, others may just be job listings. Currently its not always so clear on HN.
Show HN: I Designed this HN Mac App – Should I develop it?
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Re: Show HN: I Designed this HN Mac App – Should I develop it?
#42Looks useful. I have a suggestion, keep the width of the webpage and the comments view the same. This way the buttons remain in the same place when switching back and forth.
Re: Show HN: I Designed this HN Mac App – Should I develop it?
#43You asked: in my opinion no. The market has already largely abandoned RSS readers and I don't see single site and magazine apps having a fighting chance.
Re: Show HN: I Designed this HN Mac App – Should I develop it?
#44If you can add some smart filtering, e.g. by topic, source website etc, this would be even more valuable to me. Also ability to add to evernote / chrome bookmarks / pocket directly from the app
Last but not least, the HN community is great, but I would design it to support other new sources, if I could get all my content in one location, with filtering, and web preview, I would be a bit happier. (why not google reader? not sure actually, but fact is it's just not doing the job, neither flipboard, or any news aggregator that I know to date feels to me like the perfect solution, but that's just me).
So I'm not sure you'll be able to make a living solely from this app, but I will consider it if it really helps me organize my reading, and save me time.
Edit:
1. Forgot to mention the design looks great!
2. Note that not far ago someone posted here a Mac HN app (currently down, here is the cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...)
Here is the HN discussion on it, I think this will help you decide.
Re: Show HN: I Designed this HN Mac App – Should I develop it?
#45Holger, your design has the same issue as every other HN app - it trades condensed view for spacing and typography. The brilliance of HN's native design is an ability to see 20-30 stories per screenful. This is a must have. Otherwise it turns into Designer News [1] :) Secondly, an app that is merely an alternative view of HN webpage is not terribly interesting. It should really offer something else. For example, an a…
Thanks for the constructive criticism... always very welcome :-).
This is not a finished version of the design either. I've been fiddling with it the last 2 days to see if people would be interested.
Sounds like great inputs. Love the idea of tracking replies (why doesn't HN already do that?) and following users.
Re: Show HN: I Designed this HN Mac App – Should I develop it?
#46I love the look of the interface (web and comment view). That said, being a reader of HN, I like to use the "open web" as opposed to apps. I know a good percentage of the population here share my views. And while this may not necessarily describe you're app, it shows the sentiment: http://xkcd.com/1174/ But I'm confused when you call this a Mac app. Does that mean it would be for say, my macbook air, which I really h…
That xkcd (truth) is about about as annoying as those Facebook links where "xyz has read this story on NYTimes", you click the link cos it kinda looks interesting and it directs you to "add this Facebook app" to read the story.
Seriously, no. I'm not giving you access to my info just to read a story.
Re: Show HN: I Designed this HN Mac App – Should I develop it?
#47I think it's cool, but there are a couple issues:
- You display the number '8' in your demo -- what does this represent? Stories are frequently added to HN
- You provide a lot of functionality in the Menu tool (vote, comment), but you don't provide the actual content -- presumably this is opened in a browser? If you look at Spotlight, it provides a preview, though this is probably not readable enough
- It seems to me that keeping simple is important; for example, keeping to a single rectangle like Spotlight could be a good UI pattern; having multiple rectangles that are locked in places feels very klunky
That said, I think designing this could be very fun and a great learning experience. Someone once told me that the the reason to create tools is to help yourself; if this tool ends up being fun and useful for you to use, you have succeeded (a lot of others call this "dogfooding", though I think that has a bit of a negative ring to it).
Some tips regarding engineering:
- this could be a useful GitHub project to get started with NSStatusItems (i.e. menubar apps), if you haven't already seen it -- https://github.com/shpakovski/Popup
- it might be very very effective to use Python, at least for prototyping, especially for scraping information from HN; in particular, I am thinking of BeautifulSoup, though similar packages may exist for ObjC; to integrate Python into your app, you can either use something like PyObjc or directly bundle in a python interpreter and read output from it...
Good luck!
Re: Show HN: I Designed this HN Mac App – Should I develop it?
#48I love the look of the interface (web and comment view). That said, being a reader of HN, I like to use the "open web" as opposed to apps. I know a good percentage of the population here share my views. And while this may not necessarily describe you're app, it shows the sentiment: http://xkcd.com/1174/ But I'm confused when you call this a Mac app. Does that mean it would be for say, my macbook air, which I really h…
I know where you are coming from. I also like to use the open web, but it bugs me when I end up with opening 5-10 tabs each time I go into HN and have to navigate around between them and close them again.
It is for the Mac and not for the iPhone/iPad (might come later).
If you have no need for it, it's probably not for you. Hehe.
Re: Show HN: I Designed this HN Mac App – Should I develop it?
#49[deleted]
Re: Show HN: I Designed this HN Mac App – Should I develop it?
#50You should absolutely develop it. It doesn't matter if anyone will use it or other's opinions about it. Here's the deal, from your own post, you have plenty of time on your hands and you could learn a lot from developing this application. It's also yet another project for your resume. Try developing it in something you aren't familiar with, backbone or flask or sinatra, etc.