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Materialistic – Ad free, open source Hacker News client

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Re: Materialistic – Ad free, open source Hacker News client

#61

Post by lake99 »

hidro wrote: post #59
PieterH wrote: post #54

Just installed it, used it for a few hours, loved it, and deinstalled it. Here's why. First, no downvote action. We need this to push down trolls and sockpuppets. Second, voting is inside a menu, yet this is a really common action. Third and worst, when I use a browser on HN, every single link now asks me to select an app. Not once, but for each different link type it seems. After the fifth time (choosing 'Remember m…

Sorry you don't find it useful :( No downvote is a known issue, partly because I can't test it, so I'm not confident I'll deliver a reliable feature. I agree that upvote should be more visible. Currently it's available as an option tucked in popup menu, as well as via swipe gesture, which is not very discoverable. 3rd one is a feature called 'deep link' which is quite common in Android. It should remember your choice…

No, I don't think you can fix the 'remember choice' feature. Practically all apps ask me for that when I click on a domain I haven't clicked on before. 'Remember' will only remember the choice for that domain.

Re: Materialistic – Ad free, open source Hacker News client

#62

Post by PieterH »

hidro wrote: post #59
PieterH wrote: post #54

Just installed it, used it for a few hours, loved it, and deinstalled it. Here's why. First, no downvote action. We need this to push down trolls and sockpuppets. Second, voting is inside a menu, yet this is a really common action. Third and worst, when I use a browser on HN, every single link now asks me to select an app. Not once, but for each different link type it seems. After the fifth time (choosing 'Remember m…

Sorry you don't find it useful :( No downvote is a known issue, partly because I can't test it, so I'm not confident I'll deliver a reliable feature. I agree that upvote should be more visible. Currently it's available as an option tucked in popup menu, as well as via swipe gesture, which is not very discoverable. 3rd one is a feature called 'deep link' which is quite common in Android. It should remember your choice…

I found it very useful and really liked it, just these problems were so irritating I dropped it again. I'm hoping you can fix this, because I have trouble with reading HN on a browser, with its tiny font size.

I suspect you've got a bug with the deep link feature because other apps only show this menu one time. Yours shows it over and over.

While we're talking, I also found the UI rather busy with stuff that seems unnecessary. Half the fun with HN is its simplicity. If you ever get the urge, think about doing an Apple and removing stuff that people don't use.

Nice work, anyhow, and thanks for that. Consider making a paid version of the app with no differences, except you get some money back from it.

Re: Materialistic – Ad free, open source Hacker News client

#64

Post by curiousgal »

hidro wrote: post #59
PieterH wrote: post #54

Just installed it, used it for a few hours, loved it, and deinstalled it. Here's why. First, no downvote action. We need this to push down trolls and sockpuppets. Second, voting is inside a menu, yet this is a really common action. Third and worst, when I use a browser on HN, every single link now asks me to select an app. Not once, but for each different link type it seems. After the fifth time (choosing 'Remember m…

Sorry you don't find it useful :( No downvote is a known issue, partly because I can't test it, so I'm not confident I'll deliver a reliable feature. I agree that upvote should be more visible. Currently it's available as an option tucked in popup menu, as well as via swipe gesture, which is not very discoverable. 3rd one is a feature called 'deep link' which is quite common in Android. It should remember your choice…

I sent you an email.

Re: Materialistic – Ad free, open source Hacker News client

#65

Post by nl »

Why doesn't YCombinator just fix the mobile style sheet for the website?

It's pretty clear the site is terrible on mobile, and it's not a hard thing to improve. Make the font bigger, and (especially) make the buttons much, much bigger (or further apart).

Actually - why don't they fix that on the desktop version? Fitt's law and all that.

Re: Materialistic – Ad free, open source Hacker News client

#67

Post by hidro »

PieterH wrote: post #62
hidro wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry you don't find it useful :( No downvote is a known issue, partly because I can't test it, so I'm not confident I'll deliver a reliable feature. I agree that upvote should be more visible. Currently it's available as an option tucked in popup menu, as well as via swipe gesture, which is not very discoverable. 3rd one is a feature called 'deep link' which is quite common in Android. It should remember your choice…

I found it very useful and really liked it, just these problems were so irritating I dropped it again. I'm hoping you can fix this, because I have trouble with reading HN on a browser, with its tiny font size. I suspect you've got a bug with the deep link feature because other apps only show this menu one time. Yours shows it over and over. While we're talking, I also found the UI rather busy with stuff that seems un…

Thanks! Would be helpful if you can share your device info so I can try to reproduce that issue. If you still keep the app around you can just send an in-app feedback and it will automatically include such info. Or you can reply here. Or if you can email me, my email should be available on Play Store listing.

Re: Materialistic – Ad free, open source Hacker News client

#68

Post by shostack »

hidro wrote: post #31
bitmapbrother wrote: post #29

It's a nice app and I've been using it for some time, but one thing that's always bothered me is the strange scrolling / caching behavior of the app. A quick scroll down displays a blank page while content is gradually "plugged" in. I don't think I've ever seen this odd scrolling behavior in another app.

It's because stories/comments are loaded on demand. If you never scroll to it it won't be loaded. It was designed this way partly due to how HN API works, which doesn't provide all data up front. Alternatively app can aggressively load everything up front, which is slow; or paginate content. To me it tends to feel faster when u have progressive UI change (empty card then fill it) than abrupt change (completely empty…

I used another app called HN before yours. It did not have this problem. TBH I'd rather have it aggressively load all the content. It isn't that much data and the current experience is frankly jarring.

I also can't seem to figure out how to consistently jump to the next top level parent comment with the nav button. It seems to jump to other comments lower in the current thread which I'm trying to skip past. Am I missing something?

Overall love the app though. Love that I can click a user name and see their profile.

One other odd thing is when I open a HN Notify email link telling me I have a response, I can't figure out how to go up a level from the response comment to my parent comment they responded to in order to remind myself what I posted.

Re: Materialistic – Ad free, open source Hacker News client

#69

Post by mschuster91 »

PieterH wrote: post #54

Just installed it, used it for a few hours, loved it, and deinstalled it. Here's why. First, no downvote action. We need this to push down trolls and sockpuppets. Second, voting is inside a menu, yet this is a really common action. Third and worst, when I use a browser on HN, every single link now asks me to select an app. Not once, but for each different link type it seems. After the fifth time (choosing 'Remember m…

> Third and worst, when I use a browser on HN, every single link now asks me to select an app. Not once, but for each different link type it seems. After the fifth time (choosing 'Remember my choice' each time), I was so annoyed I uninstalled Materialistic.

That's Android's fault, not the fault of Materialistic. I have the same problem totally random on my phone, too.

Re: Materialistic – Ad free, open source Hacker News client

#70

Post by pjc50 »

nl wrote: post #65

Why doesn't YCombinator just fix the mobile style sheet for the website? It's pretty clear the site is terrible on mobile, and it's not a hard thing to improve. Make the font bigger, and (especially) make the buttons much, much bigger (or further apart). Actually - why don't they fix that on the desktop version? Fitt's law and all that.

Indeed. And stop doing whatever crazy CSS thing is used to implement the upvote/downvote arrows and just make them images in an href. Why? Because on some touchscreen browsers there's a fuzzy snap to nearest link, which turns a press on the upvote into a click on the username.

My own personal solution to this was to write an intercepting proxy in Perl CGI like it's 1999. Then I can fix the HTML with regexes.

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