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Show HN: New Hacker News web client

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Re: Show HN: New Hacker News web client

#73
Nice job! Not to pull anything away from it, but I just published my first Mac app to the App Store, its a native HN client. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mackernews-hacker-news-clien... Will do an official post once i have a landing page up.

Nice job on your webclient. Loving the material design-eque buttons :)

Re: Show HN: New Hacker News web client

#74

In the words of Steve Jobs: "That is really ugly, and you're fired". It has that failed Web 3.0 look. More rounded corners, excessive margin, but less content per page. One commenter pointed out its easier on mobile, but that can be resolved with the existing style. Please, think of the children.

> but less content per page This is why engineers are not designers. Left up to engineers, every pixel would be crammed full of "content", all at 11px font.

fwiw I'm not a designer but I found it very hard to read because of all of the excess spacing. I had to read one article header at a time instead of just scanning my eyes.

Re: Show HN: New Hacker News web client

#75
post #17
post #2

Based on the Firebase HN API, I made a web client that updates stories and scores in real-time. No need to refresh your browser anymore to see new stories and comments. Also, I used a responsive design to be able to read the stories on my mobile phone. For now, I only show the top stories, up to 100 of them ( that's how many the API gives you anyway ). If people find it useful, I might add other things. Hope OAuth be…

The visualisation of live upvotes is nice, how did you handle that state-wise in React? I also have comment counts and whatever data is used to dim downvoted comments on my API wishlist ( my own implementation is http://insin.github.io/react-hn ). An endpoint for just ask/show/jobs items would also be nice.

@insin This project is an opportunity for me to make some production-ready thing on Flux/React. I'm new to it.

I have two stores, one for the news stories, and one for the comments. And then a smaller one for the notifications. I don't use any state in the components. Everything propagates from the top level and the stores.

The counter component doesn't have a state, but when it sees an update, it just adds/removes a class and that's how you get the animation.

Re: Show HN: New Hacker News web client

#76

Some comment section feedback: The horizontal indentation on the comments might be a bit aggressive, and each comment is taking up a great deal of vertical screen real estate. Further, the clickable "more" makes reading long comment threads difficult without a great deal of scrolling. It seems to be optimized for mobile viewing, which is good. Dobbs knows how I hate clicking tiny links with my fat fingers. But, when…

@atoponce I kept the same indentation because I wanted to have a familiar design. That tree structure is not easy to display. Showing all of the comments at once can be a disaster in slow connections. "Show more" button is needed for now. I hope later I can give users the ability to customize how many things to load. I've only been working on this project for 3-4 days now. Front and back end.

I already have some thoughts on how to handle the comments section, I agree it has to be very efficient cause the whole point of the client is to let you get in and out of the comments section easily. Reading the headlines is the easy part.

If anyone is a designer or has design suggestions, I'm happy to see them.

Re: Show HN: New Hacker News web client

#78
post #23

This looks good, the animation on hover doesn't add any value though. My favourite HN client on phone is http://cheeaun.github.io/hackerweb/ . It's lean, fast and looks like a native app on the phone. I've added a shortcut to my mobile's home screen, using the 'Add to Home Screen' option in Chrome, which gives me a nice quick launch icon. The downside of both these clients is that you can't login or post using them.

@nnain I removed the "on hover" animation. Login and posting, is not available from the HN API. so not much to do there.
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