US $ 1.49 to access Hacker News content through an app?! This should be open source and free.
cool; please post here when you're done.
browser is fine, thanks; yeah, cool, take other people's content and monetize...
Read your Hacker News in Tile Style
31–40 of 57 posts
Re: Read your Hacker News in Tile Style
#32I feel like the Tile Layout isn't the most useful thing for a site like Hacker News- perhaps if we had more images, I'd see it, but the Tile Layout turns our column of text into a wall of text.
Does anybody know if it handles opening links or comments?
Re: Read your Hacker News in Tile Style
#33Re: Read your Hacker News in Tile Style
#34Tile style seems to really de-emphasize the titles of the articles in favor of their score.
Emphasizing the score, especially with the ranking algorithm being so time based is fairly confusing. It seems like the number should be in order, but they of course aren't.
A fix may be as simple as changing the two greys, having the darker grey behind the article title, and the lighter one behind the number. Also, increasing the contrast in the title text would be great.
Re: Read your Hacker News in Tile Style
#35Just from a UX perspective, I wonder what seems like a more natural ordering: [ 1 2 ] [ 3 4 ] Is more natural to read than: [ 1 3 ] [ 2 4 ] I would think that since we read from left to right and then down, that the standard matrix ordering row, then column, might be more preferable. Yet, horizontal scroll plays a larger role in metro, so this might not be a bad idea. I'd love to hear from someone who knows anything…
This is, in my opinion, the single largest problem with tile matrices that have unrestricted length and width. Its very hard to tailor the reading experience to be anything better than mediocre -- and at times on short, wide screens, its downright awful. Windows 8 makes a mess of things by scrolling sideways in landscape mode, then up and down in portrait mode. Readability is sacrificed at the alter of adaptable design. The tiles lead the eyes no where -- because content can really go in any direction (up down left right? why not down through 3D or even up or spinning maybe too? They are all done in Windows 8)
The other thing tiles do poorly is constrain the variances on line lengths by boxing them in. When you scan headlines, you naturally grip the page using the various headline lengths. Boxing them in and cutting them off makes every headline appear the same length and kills their distinguishability (and implied reading direction).
Ultimately, I believe its most comfortable read across the most narrow dimension of a screen -- depending on orientation -- then scroll the opposite of the reading direction.
That being said, users will also tend towards their native reading direction (Japanese users will read down, English, readers across from left to right, Arabic from the right to left)
Discloser: Im a UX and UI designer who has worked on Windows 8, iOS, Android, and about 10 other operation systems. I have also designed mixed language or language-free interfaces to varying success.
Re: Read your Hacker News in Tile Style
#36Re: Read your Hacker News in Tile Style
#37Looks great from the screenshot, I'll have to try this out later. The description doesn't state whether you can comment, post or vote from the app - I take it that's not possible?
Currently you cannot comment, post or vote from the app. It's possible, albeit more complicated. The problem is one of security, so we are taking a bit more time to ensure we do the commenting, posting and voting correctly. This is something we will have in soon though!
I second biot's idea. I'll buy it right now though since I want to see it go further and you need money for that. Might I suggest for the time being adding in a right click and "open in browser" that leads to the comment page for the article? That ways it's at least a quick one step to get where you need to be in order to comment and upvote.
Re: Read your Hacker News in Tile Style
#38US $ 1.49 to access Hacker News content through an app?! This should be open source and free.
I don't mind that the dude is charging $1.49 for his efforts, but the code should be open sourced!
Would you do something with it, if it was open source? I can't understand people begging to have everything open sourced, but unwilling to dedicate time to write a single line of code (or patches, or testing, or documentation).
Yes, it's okay for developers to invest their own time to develop something, and try to recover their costs by selling it. And it's also ok if they decide to keep it closed source, because probably no one would bother to help. Just vote with your money.
(posted using news:yc on iOS, that I paid $2.99. And it's open source btw).
Re: Read your Hacker News in Tile Style
#39Tile style seems to really de-emphasize the titles of the articles in favor of their score. Emphasizing the score, especially with the ranking algorithm being so time based is fairly confusing. It seems like the number should be in order, but they of course aren't. A fix may be as simple as changing the two greys, having the darker grey behind the article title, and the lighter one behind the number. Also, increasing…
Good suggestions, will experiment a bit and see what we can do to improve it!
Re: Read your Hacker News in Tile Style
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Currently you cannot comment, post or vote from the app. It's possible, albeit more complicated. The problem is one of security, so we are taking a bit more time to ensure we do the commenting, posting and voting correctly. This is something we will have in soon though!
I second biot's idea. I'll buy it right now though since I want to see it go further and you need money for that. Might I suggest for the time being adding in a right click and "open in browser" that leads to the comment page for the article? That ways it's at least a quick one step to get where you need to be in order to comment and upvote.
Great idea! We are rolling out an update today, but will be sure to wrap in all of these suggestions in a follow-up update soon!