A little competition for http://hn.embed.ly? Heh. We think rich data makes much better previews then screenshots. What does HN think about this site vs. hn.embed.ly?
I've been playing with visual (screenshot-based) readers for a few years now, with my most recent effort being 'Percolater', a visual reader for the iPad. When demoing Percolater to current iPad users that are used to 'intelligent' content re-arrangers like Flipboard, Pulse, and hn.embed.ly, the people that tend to prefer a screenshot representation tend to be those that are more on the design end of the spectrum. There is a tremendous amount of context contained within the layout of a given page, and we've become very good at determining the likelihood that a page will be worth reading purely based on layout cues. Snapshots have the ability to further allow us to pre-filter what's important. There are a great many people that feel that ad removal is unequivocally a good thing, and for them, pulling out some text and an image and shoving it in a box is perfectly suitable for their browsing needs. I don't happen to be one of those people, hence the thing I've made.
I think this would benefit greatly from some sort of collapse feature. The nice thing about browsing titles-only ("vanilla") HN is that things that I don't want to read take up very minimal screen space. With this, I had to work too hard to scroll past this entry: http://i.imgur.com/Z9t67.png
You can also fold the article with 'd', and show the top comment with 'c'. Shift+C opens the comment thread too. Pressing '?' will bring up a box that lists all the shortcuts:
j or → Select next article
k or ← Select previous article
c Toggle Hacker News top comment
shift + c Open Hacker News comments page in a new window
d Toggle article content
enter Follow the article link in this window
shift + enter Follow the article link in a new window
? Show this keyboard shortcuts dialog
This kind of UI would work well on other HN-like sites, e.g. links to pretty web designs, but the nature of HN links means the screenshots are almost all the same thing: an article, a possible image, some ads or links on the side.
Because of the extra space taken up by screenshots, the most important thing - link title - has to be truncated, and it's not showing vote/comment counts.
It's always good to experiment with UIs, but in this case, I think the experiment shows the UI is more suited to other kinds of links.
I think url2png is really cool, but I was a bit pissed when from one day to the next they went to a subscription model and added sign-up links to all screenshots. Their fair right, of course, but no fun if you just started using it.
I have been using the service for over 3 months and I remember telling the founder I would pay for it. Well. looks like I am going to send my check now :). Gladly.
I agree. This is more of a proof-of-concept / demo of the url2png api. If the post looks interesting to you, just hover over the image thumbnail to view the title.
I usually enjoy visual browsers like this, but here the previews are too small for it to click for me. Just to provide a counterexample, this one is pretty cool and along similar lines: http://news.peepcode.com/
I love the concept, but I'd rather have the links open in the same window. Just change your target attributes and I will switch over to this solution permanently.
perhaps a Google Instant Preview style extension where you hover over the default view link and a screenshot is displayed on the side? That would be a great browser extension!
Can we have a place that lists all the HN related sites? Or maybe PG can create such a page and link it at the top/bottom. That would be useful instead of them getting lost in the old posts and people who haven't seen the posts missing them.
