Cool, I'm using it to write this. Seems to work well enough. I wish there was a light theme, as I'm not really a fan of the light grey on black. Also,the voting doesn't seem to work correctly. I voted up this story, then quit the app and re-launched it, and it said I hadn't voted. Trying to vote it up again though failed, as the vote had indeed gone through.
That's correct... I'm using the ihackernews.com API at the moment, so your votes aren't reflected in the data I get from there if you reload the app/page. If/when I use an html parser to fetch all the data directly from new.ycombinator this bug will be fixed. For now, if the number of points changes after you vote, it means the vote went through successfully.
Maybe keep a list of my votes in the application cache and check against that as well as the ihackernews API? Same with my comments, too. I would really enjoy if it appeared to have read-your-writes consistency.
Yes, that's probably what I'll do in the interim. I'll have to figure out how to do these checks efficiently. Scrolling lists in Android is already clunky due to the way rows are rendered, so I'll need to make sure to not make it worse by checking the entire 'already-voted-list' for each row.
Feature request: offline operation and background sync, so I can read HN offline. Presumably voting/commenting wouldn't work while offline. Of course, if you're going down that rabbit hole, you also want to prefetch and cache the content of the links.
This was going to be my comment - I often do my on-phone reading on the subway/elevator - would be great to have an app that worked when I don't have cell phone service.
Why. Why are we doing this? Why do people go and write this stuff when there is already the web. That doesn’t require an app store. It can use the same code as the actual website (imagine that).
Why are we running so fast in the wrong direction?
The web still sucks for phones. The formatting is better in apps and it runs faster than the browser. I don't have to double tap text to bring it to human readable size or deal with lag when scrolling. Until phone browsers and/or web sites catch up, apps such as this provide a lot of relief.
I half agree, half disagree with you. The web doesn't suck for phones, the websites suck for phones. If websites use a fluid layout or a mobile layout, nobody has to write an app for them. Posterous is great to read on mobiles due to their theme.
I hope more companies start using those tricks that let websites resize gracefully on any size screen, so you don't even need a mobile theme. Your layout just adjusts gracefully to the screen.
Sorry, by "web" I meant websites. Mobile layouts are nice when they are implemented correctly. The worst case is when a mobile version routes your request to a default landing page rather than the requested article or whatever or strips out functionality that exists in the regular version.
I expect that things will only improve as more people access the web via mobile devices. I think I use my phone more than a standard computer these days.
Yes, I think we're agreeing, but, to clarify, I meant that it's not websites in general (as in, the technology) that sucks, but particular websites (most of them) which haven't correctly implemented mobile-friendly versions.
By far my favourite are websites which detects you are on a mobile device and then (automatically, no questions asked, no override available) "redirects" you to what is supposedly the same content on their mobile site.
And then the mobile site crashes for whatever reason? Malformed URL? Heck if I know. I just know I can't get to the website.
It also seems a lot of websites has a "standard" mobile-version (which is basically some iPhone-app like standard theme) which also always crashes when visited. Might be a WP-plugin, but I'm honestly not sure. 90% of the time though, it crashes and it wont let you go to the original web-page either.
Really. Until the web gets better at dealing with mobile devices, you will see applications like this being popular.
One reason is that if you load the web page, you have to download the UI every single page load. With an app, the downloaded data should be quite a bit more stripped down... but to be honest I couldn't say how the app gets its data.
It might be scraping downloaded pages. In that case, I'd tend to agree with you about an HN app as it doesn't contain anything that requires a fluid interface.
"download the UI every single page load" - Client side XSLT resolves this. I'll admit that client side XSLT has other problems though. Compare these two urls:
No. Any well written web page can cache itself for offline use, and use AJAX to load all data after the first page. This is how iUI works, and therefore most iPhone-specific web apps.
I couldn't disagree more. The way we've always used the web is to have some content and a web server and let clients use an app to connect to our site and use the services. The difference is, we used a generic app (web browser) and had to encode all the presentation in with the content.
In my opinion this is going in exactly the right direction. Let clients worry about how to display the data and the web servers/services provide the content. Then your "web apps" can do anything. 3D, open GL, anything the device can support.
If you make all apps just be browser apps then you have to put all code for all possible clients on the server side. Doing things this way means I can write a really great web service and hire people for the different clients to make the best possible client. I don't need to worry about it at all, nor maintain these different clients.
At the same time as I agree with you, I also use these kind of apps. Typically they are faster and also offer better integration with the native features of the phone than a browser experience does. Perhaps you should take up the challenge and make an HTML5 equivalent and see how well you can do?
I agree. I never use applications written only for one website unless it provides additional features (e.g. the Facebook application includes hooks to the whole system for uploading pictures and such). I find it unnecessarily tedious to think beyond needing a web browser for web browsing.
Very nice. My favourite of the apps so far and a first use makes me think I'll keep this for more than a day (unlike many of the others).
Particularly: the positioning of the voting buttons and the simple main screen that is easy to intuit.
I was actually unlikely to grab my phone and try this but the huge QR code at the top of your page made it too easy to miss. A nice little touch that I wish every app maker would use.
Unfortunately, my HN account uses OpenID to login, so I can't login with this app as it only allows for standard username/password accounts. Is there any way to assign a regular password to my account?
Cool, thanks. Yes I know there are other android clients, but the ones I found on the Market had lots of reviews saying that login, voting, and commenting were missing (and I wanted a layout more similar to the website). So I wrote my own client as an exercise and decided to publish it.
