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Show HN: Akepa – Our HN App

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Re: Show HN: Akepa – Our HN App

#51

Post by lobster_johnson »

andrewksl wrote: post #48
lobster_johnson wrote: post #19

Congrats, 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.

Another feature I love about Minihack: The split screen view. When on an iPad, that exploits landscape orientation very nicely.

Re: Show HN: Akepa – Our HN App

#53

Post by lobster_johnson »

Matt3o12_ wrote: post #46

This 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…

Have you tried Minihack? It has all of those features (including Instapaper "readability" integration). I used the Patel app for a long time, too, but it is not as good.

Re: Show HN: Akepa – Our HN App

#54

Post by Matt3o12_ »

andrewksl wrote: post #50
Matt3o12_ wrote: post #46

This 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.

Hey, thanks!

As of the reading mode (that was the word I was looking for), Yes, I have heard about it. I use it when I load a webpage in Safari. Still, it is only available when the page finished loading. When I'm riding the train I have edge internet + heigh latency and package loss, loading a JS library (that almost every webpage has), is close to impossible. It takes ages and almost always times out. Since most of the time the tags are in the header, the content won't be visible until the scripts are there. Maybe there is a library that does the job.

Re: Show HN: Akepa – Our HN App

#56

Post by Matt3o12_ »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #53
Matt3o12_ wrote: post #46

This 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…

Have you tried Minihack? It has all of those features (including Instapaper "readability" integration). I used the Patel app for a long time, too, but it is not as good.

No I haven't because it is $3 and I don't want to spend "so much money" for an app, I might not end up using (just like all the other 1000 Hacker News apps that are out there). I might give it a shot, though, if you say it's worth the money.

Re: Show HN: Akepa – Our HN App

#57

Post by superasn »

taylorling wrote: post #18
danmaz74 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They lost us...

Trust me (and us), we wanted to make the best HN reading experience on Android devices as well, but we are totally short of hands, therefore iOS for now.

I generally don't get excited about apps, but this one made me search for it.. too bad I was searching on the wrong store.

Re: Show HN: Akepa – Our HN App

#58

Post by alexggordon »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #19

Congrats, 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;…

To be honest, I didn't know you could collapse comments. Since there's not a way to "discover" it in the UI, I figured that it didn't exist. While I'm not sure of the implementation, I think it would be a benefit to the end users to show off that feature better in the UI.

Re: Show HN: Akepa – Our HN App

#59

Post by andrewksl »

belltyler wrote: post #49
SG- wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you implying we don't attribute all the libraries we use? ;) Everything we use is there. We're not using any closed source frameworks.

Re: Show HN: Akepa – Our HN App

#60

Post by andrewksl »

Matt3o12_ wrote: post #54
andrewksl wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hey, thanks! As of the reading mode (that was the word I was looking for), Yes, I have heard about it. I use it when I load a webpage in Safari. Still, it is only available when the page finished loading. When I'm riding the train I have edge internet + heigh latency and package loss, loading a JS library (that almost every webpage has), is close to impossible. It takes ages and almost always times out. Since most of…

You should be able to enter reading mode before the page finishes (or even starts, for that matter) loading.

We use the readability (https://www.readability.com/) API, which does all scraping/parsing server-side.

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