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Show HN: Hacker News Reader for the iPad

17 points by arikfr ↗ HN
Since I got an iPad I was looking for a better Hacker News reading experience than the one you can get using the web version. On the iPhone I use the ihackernews.com web app (and soon going to try news.yc). It's decent for the iPhone, but it doesn't scale good on the iPad. To my surprise, when I checked there was no decent iPad app for HN (i.e. lacking ability to comment or vote, no readability support and more).

I anyway wanted to give a try to iPad development, and was looking for an interesting project to work on. Making HN reader app seemed as a good candidate. Over the last weekend I started working on the app.

The app will be ready for beta by the end of this week (sign up here: http://bit.ly/kCp6XL) and released as open source (http://github.com/arikfr/hnhd) and to the App Store by the mid of June.

Screenshots and more information can be found in the intro post: http://hnhd.posterous.com/introducing-hacker-news-reader-for-the-ipad

Will appreciate feedback, beta testers and ideas for a name.

THANKS!

11 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 39.7 ms ] thread
kloncks
Looks great.

As someone who logins using OpenID, in order for this app to be useful, I'd need that feature. Currently, I don't know of any apps that let me do that, but I bet it's very doable.

(Just open a Safari instance to let me login to my Google id via OpenID then redirect me, right?)

BenSS
It's doable, but I skipped it in the HN reader for iPad that I did. Why? Because of the people I know who read HN, none of them use OpenID.

Unfortunately, the mobile Safari doesn't share that information with the app UIWebView. It needs to be handled within the app itself. (although you could get around it in my version but manually logging in from the comments page)

arikfr
As @BenSS mentioned, Safari doesn't share cookies with UIWebView object. Also I'm planning on implementing the comments views with native UI, therefore I will have to handle all the authorization myself. Not sure if I can act as "man in the middle" in this case for HN and the OpenID provider.

I will look into it, but it won't make it into the first version...

xyzzyb
I have a great experience pointing Reeder at the hacker news rss feed. Its readability feature allows me to, with a click either parse the linked article into a nice looking format or read the HN comments.
arikfr
Hopefully I will be able to deliver a better HN reading experience than that :-)
xyzzyb
Seriously, reeder is already a great experience for me. My app use looks very similar to your screenshots, but with the typography of reeder already baked in. With just a click I can: take notes, pinboard an article (or any link in the article or comments), parse whatever I'm looking at through instapaper, open any link in safari, tweet any of the links, share a story via google reader, email the link or text of an article.

You should check it out, at the very least as a point of reference.

arikfr
Some of these I already plan to add to the app (or have them). But I will give Reeder a spin and see what I can learn from it.
richardg
Nice work. Good to know people are working on this kind of stuff. Will check out the code.

Made a one-page site for an HN reader too but just for the web. Been planning to roll out a mobile version too but got few responses/comments.

It's http://ireadhn.g-webtech.com/

arikfr
Thanks.

As for your reader: I think you should remove the Twitter box on the right and give more screen real estate for the iframe (on my Macbook I need to scroll left/right the article in order to see it properly when it opens).

Also, why the comment links don't work?

richardg
Yes, it should. your the 2nd to comment on the comments. Will update the site later on.