Unofficial alternative UI of hackernews • Hacker News Board

Re: Unofficial alternative UI of hackernews

#41

Post by endtime » Fri, Sep 24, 2010, 4:28 PM UTC

MrJagil wrote: post #39

This is where I actually think Digg is better than HN and Reddit. Their content and community may not be nearly as good, but at least they ATTEMPT to improve their UI and general functionality. Soon I have been on HN for a year, and I do not think I have noticed a single change to the site. I know that interface is not everything and that once you get used to this simple one, you really get to like it, but I would ju…

I'd suggest you educate yourself on the origins and goals of HN before you start complaining that it's not trying to compete with Digg.

Re: Unofficial alternative UI of hackernews

#42

Post by wvl » Fri, Sep 24, 2010, 5:51 PM UTC

Author here. Part of the reason I built this is so that I could skip a day or two, and still come back and see what was posted. Unfortunately, that means finding this thread 11 hours after it was posted. I'll respond to the comments.

Re: Unofficial alternative UI of hackernews

#43

Post by wvl » Fri, Sep 24, 2010, 5:52 PM UTC

cubicle67 wrote: post #4

You know, you could probably harvest quite a number of passwords by adding a small 'login' link to the top right corner of the page

Sure, I could. Which is why I didn't.

Re: Unofficial alternative UI of hackernews

#44

Post by wvl » Fri, Sep 24, 2010, 5:54 PM UTC

marbletiles wrote: post #23

Hoped this would be for the comments page -- would love one that didn't reorder the comments as they are rated. I find it desperately hard to find what's new when revisiting a comment thread, unless I've posted in it and can go in via "threads".

If you go to the about page[1], you'll find extensions for both chrome and safari. These extensions will highlight new comments, as well as make comment threads collapsible (a la reddit).

http://hckrnews.com/about.html

Re: Unofficial alternative UI of hackernews

#45

Post by wvl » Fri, Sep 24, 2010, 6:00 PM UTC

isleyaardvark wrote: post #27

Overall, I dislike it. On the plus side there are more stories to scroll through and the hover effect is nice. But I don't think that makes up for the font. Plus, when you scroll down there's no way to tell which column is comments and which is points.

What OS/browser are you using? What is your issue with the font? edit: Others seemed to be saying the same thing. I switched to a sans family stack. Let me know if that is better.

As for the column thing -- this is something I use every day, so I designed it mostly for repeat usage. I didn't want to pin a header or add extraneous text to make that clear. Use it for a while, and it should become second nature that points is closest to the story description.

Re: Unofficial alternative UI of hackernews

#46

Post by wvl » Fri, Sep 24, 2010, 6:02 PM UTC

AgentConundrum wrote: post #11

It looks a bit odd for me in Firefox. I'm assuming the comments/points totals were supposed to line up... http://imgur.com/RLkXX?full

Hmmm, that is strange. I did test it in Firefox a while back, but I must have changed something in the meantime. I run Safari and Chrome personally, so I never noticed that. I'll see if I can fix that.

edit: It should be fixed now. Thanks for reporting the problem.

Re: Unofficial alternative UI of hackernews

#47

Post by wvl » Fri, Sep 24, 2010, 6:04 PM UTC

chaosmachine wrote: post #12

Sorting by date is a great idea, easier to keep up with than a list that randomly reorders every few minutes because of changing point values.

Thanks! I'm glad someone appreciates it. Seems everyone else is very worried about my spare time and how I wasted it... :)

Re: Unofficial alternative UI of hackernews

#48

Post by wvl » Fri, Sep 24, 2010, 6:08 PM UTC

sbt wrote: post #28

I don't think this is a good idea. As a somewhat loose comparison I wouldn't make a newyrktimes.com with an alternative layout either. There must be endless other ways of spending one's spare time, e.g. by making something you can charge for. I know this sounds harsh and I don't mean to rip on the author personally, but in general I think there are too many derivative-of-derivative services out there.

Thanks for the input. I'm working on my startup as well, so don't be too worried about how I'm spending my spare time.

In fact, in one way, I made this so I could spend more time on my startup. I found myself wasting too much time reading Hacker News. Either I was procrastinating and refreshing too often, where I found it hard to either identify what story was new that I hadn't seen, or which ones I'd already seen but did not interest me. Or, I was going back and reading simply so I wouldn't miss anything, since stories tend to trail off pretty quickly unless they get a lot of votes.

Re: Unofficial alternative UI of hackernews

#49

Post by wvl » Fri, Sep 24, 2010, 6:18 PM UTC

futuremint wrote: post #32

The very first thing I tried to do was click on the words "comments" and "points" to sort the entries by that column. Placing those columns on the left-hand side gives them the highest importance. Is that the intention of this UI?

I can understand why you thought they would be sortable. However, it's designed around being a chronological list. When I want to scan the higher rated stories, I use the filter links -- top 10, top 20, top 50%. Sorting by points or comments does make some sense, however, it is also a function of how long a story has been posted -- so I don't really think a javascript sort in place would be too useful.

As for the UI design -- I wanted a simple list of stories that I could scan, plus I wanted to be able to see the points and number of comments associated with that story. While I understand your point about highest importance, if I had placed the numbers on the right the ragged right nature of the text would make it hard to scan.

Re: Unofficial alternative UI of hackernews

#50

Post by wvl » Fri, Sep 24, 2010, 6:24 PM UTC

ecaradec wrote: post #7

This isn't exactly news. There is a page that include several HN related services here : http://resourcey.com/site_details/2/news.ycombinator.com/

I'm not sure who posted this this time, but when I first posted it, it never found much traction.

One of (IMHO) the problems with Hacker News is that there is no good way to store and locate meta information. So all the mashups, meetups, resources that have been inspired or built around and by the community live and die by being posted as stories. If someone isn't an obsessive reader of the site, it's pretty easy to miss these things. Resourcey is a good link, but you must also know it exists in order to find the other links.