Excellent, excellent. Does it phone home?
That is, does it connect strictly to the HN and only websites explicitly opened by the user? Or does it talk to something else on the Internet behind user's back?
Show HN: Akepa – Our HN App
41–50 of 90 posts
Re: Show HN: Akepa – Our HN App
#42Re: Show HN: Akepa – Our HN App
#43Just downloaded, seems really polished and looks beautiful. I'm currently a user of http://hn.premii.com , I'd make the switch to your app if you can get the 'yesterday's best' page, and an option to have readability mode on by default. Very promising though, out of interest how long have you spent on the project?
Wow, that's a great looking webapp.
Its not just on web, it is available on both iOS and Android and works quite well on all 3 platforms.
Re: Show HN: Akepa – Our HN App
#44Excellent, excellent. Does it phone home? That is, does it connect strictly to the HN and only websites explicitly opened by the user? Or does it talk to something else on the Internet behind user's back?
We contact our servers only to verify receipts when you buy Pro (had some issues with that earlier :$). We also use analytics for crash reports.
Everything else is either direct to https://news.ycombinator.com or https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com (the official API). And, of course, sites explicitly opened by the user.
Edit: We also use the readability API for reading mode. https://www.readability.com/
Re: Show HN: Akepa – Our HN App
#45Nice app. Personally, I am pretty happy with yohackernews for mobile. One thing I'd like to know more about though is Akepa's icon / logo. It's very cool. I would love to read about your design process & ideation.
Re: Show HN: Akepa – Our HN App
#46This app is really nice and well designed but I think I'll stick with "Hacker News (YC)" by Dharmesh Patel.
Here is why:
- Your font looks really cool but I can't read it for a long period of time. Could you add an option to adjust the font size (I know I can change that in the iOS settings but when I do that, all the text is bigger and this distracts me. I only need big text for long reading sessions). Hacker News offers that in the settings.
- I really would like to test out your pro themes, but I don't want to pay the full price for testing it. How about you let us use all these themes for the top story (i.e. only for one story). If I like the themes, I'll buy pro because I want to have it for all stories. This is better then a preview text.
- I really like Hacker News' "Content read" (I don't know how to call it). Instead of opening the full HTML page, it only shows me the content of the page – without any distracting CSS fonts, ads, or banners that block the content. It is extremely helpful for pages that are not optimized for mobile and for pages that need 2 clicks to get to the content (for example github requires me to click "View all of README" although all I wanna do is read the readme. The HackerNews app takes care of that for me. It also loads the content when I'm in the underground train or in school incredible fast. I only have edge internet there and a full HTML page with all assets takes over a minute to load.
Re: Show HN: Akepa – Our HN App
#47Looks beautiful, disappointed it's iOS focused and there's no Android version.
Either way, good job.
Re: Show HN: Akepa – Our HN App
#48Congrats, seems to work pretty well. I can tell you why I won't be switching away from Minihack [1], though. First, apparently there is no collapsing support. Secondly, and more importantly, that default font. Not a fan. It's super thin, tiny, and you can't adjust the text size. Apparently there are "pro" themes, but you force the user to buy without giving a preview of what you'll be getting. Thirdly, no night mode;…
Thanks for your comments.
Dynamic type is very high on the to-do list. Akepa is a news/text reader first, and we recognize that comfortable reading is the highest priority.
Some of what you're asking for might be solved by the themes we have. We hear you on not being able to see what you're getting, though.
Re: Show HN: Akepa – Our HN App
#49Maker here. Just a fun note. One of the hardest parts about making the app was getting enough karma so we could test downvoting.
I'm hoping you didn't wait 2064 days to test the client :( Is this your first app? When did you settle on it and Swift? Are you using any Swift frameworks?
You can see at least some of the open source frameworks they've used in the app's Settings > About Us.
Re: Show HN: Akepa – Our HN App
#50This app is really nice and well designed but I think I'll stick with "Hacker News (YC)" by Dharmesh Patel. Here is why: - Your font looks really cool but I can't read it for a long period of time. Could you add an option to adjust the font size (I know I can change that in the iOS settings but when I do that, all the text is bigger and this distracts me. I only need big text for long reading sessions). Hacker News o…
Hi there. We're going to take note of the first two points and see what we can do about it.
As for the third, have you tried reading mode? It's the armchair icon to the URL in the browser.