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Show HN: Octal, a Hacker News client for iOS

14 points by dangwu ↗ HN
If you use an iPhone, please give my Hacker News app a try. It is a full-featured app with login, posting, and upvoting capabilities. It's also free for the next 48 hours! Feedback is highly appreciated.

Octal on the Apple App Store https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id1308885491

25 comments

[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 64.9 ms ] thread
cylo
This is actually one of the best iOS HN clients I've seen yet. Great job on it!

The missing cherry on top is support for a true dark mode that uses the proper black OLED capabilities on the X series of devices.

dangwu
That means a lot! Thank you! And true dark is at the top of my TODO list. You’re the second person to request that.
gitgud
Looks really slick! Love the night-mode

What is this written in? Native swift?

dangwu
Yup, thank you! It's written 100% in Swift and uses the official Firebase API for read operations
codesternews
I suggest making the Stories title bold. It will be very easy to read.
dangwu
Interesting idea. I’ll give it a try and see how it looks. Thanks for the feedback!
dangwu
It's semi-bold now. Thanks for the idea :)
huxflux
Any plans for an Android version?
dangwu
Sorry - no plans. It probably wouldn't be good anyways. I'm an Android newbie.
brennebeck
Sign in doesn’t appear to be working?
dangwu
Ugh, I apologize. I found a bug with sign in for accounts with passwords containing certain special characters. Fix is in the pipeline. Thanks for notifying me!
brennebeck
Awesome, I look forward to using it :)
dangwu
Should work now. Please update and try again.
kevinyun
I've been using this app as my HN client since I've had my iPhone. Great work!
dangwu
Thanks for your support!
nickreese
How do you upvote from within the app? I may just be missing something obvious?
dangwu
Not the greatest UX here... just tap the Score/Up Arrow area. You must sign in first.
Tepix
I like your privacy policy. Too bad that it's not yet open source. I'll give it a try! Thanks!
bradknowles
So, I’m trying it out now on my iPad, which is the primary place where I do HN.

Is the only difference between regular and compact modes the display of the user avatar?

In landscape mode, could you offer a two pane interface, where the stories are in the narrow pane to the left and the comments or article being viewed is displayed in the wider pane on the right?

For the interface where a user is writing their comment, why is the background light grey while the typeface is dark grey? This seems very low-contrast and not a good color choice.

Perhaps you could do the posting interface inline with the reading interface, and not pop up a completely separate page?

How do you display all new articles in a given category, as opposed to just the top most popular ones?

I’m happy to share marked up screenshots, if that would help.

bradknowles
Oh, and how about linking to the search interface?

For example, this thread has now fallen off the bottom of the top “Show HN” posts, and so now I can’t use Octal to come back and find it.

dangwu
Search is on my list. For now, you can find your posting history from your user profile page via Settings.
dangwu
2-pane iPad support is on my big list. My app’s user base is almost entirely iPhone so it’s not that high of priority.

I agree with the color choices in the ‘add comment’ interface. I will change the colors in the next release.

As for the new articles in a category, I’m not sure if the HN API supports that. I’ll look into it.

Thanks so much for this feedback!