Thank you. And yeah it does not really work on mobile, but to be fair it's not supposed to. I only spend a few minutes on it to make it somewhat useable. As far as I know here are many other HN clones that improve the mobile experience, so I focused solely on building something cool for desktop/keyboard users.
Yes! To the UI developers: Please don't let optimizing for a single platform become a lost art. Not saying cross-platform should not be done or anything like that, but using an application that's 100% tailored to my device is nice to experience, from time to time.
I like to use the mouse anyway. Each post has the number of comments, something like "123 comments ->" Can you make the number of comments and the arrow clickable? Also, the "<- Back" inside each post.
It I'm reading a comment, the author and "open" should be clickable too. I didn't understand what "open" means, perhaps change it to "open in HN".
Thanks. I'll think about making some elements clickable. But if some are clickable and some are not it might be even more confusing if non of the elements are clickable. So I'm not sure if it's a good idea.
I'll consider changing it to "Open in HN". It is more clear about what it does but it's also longer and maybe a bit redundant.
Scrolling is disabled because this is not a website for mouse control, it's explicitly made for keyboards. You can notice this by the application not having any mouse controls at all, no links and so on. It's not user hostile if the goal is keyboard controls.
There is no reason to disable scrolling even if the primary interactions are supposed to happen with keyboard. I don’t want to remember which websites allow scrolling and which don’t.
I'd say there is a point. With disabled scrolling you can guarantee that the "cursor" will always be on the screen. With scrolling enabled, you could out scroll the selection, making for worse UI experience. I'm also not a fan of blurring the previous article, but I guess they chose to do it to put focus on your current selection.
It's an informative website. This is bad UX for an informative site. Sure it can support keyboard shortcuts for additional fast access. It will be better for power users. But disabling scrolling with mouse and touchpad is hostile and counter productive to the casual users who might be interested in the content.
Yes, but "enabling keyboard navigation" shouldn't mean disabling mouse based navigation. There are multiple people on this thread who are confused because of disabled scrolling which shows that it's bad UX.
> If you don't like it, just use Hacker News.
Yes, I will not be using this site. Just giving my feedback and opinion on the UX just like you.
> Yes, but "enabling keyboard navigation" shouldn't mean disabling mouse based navigation
If someone shows me a project for keyboard navigation, I won't complain that there is no mouse navigation, as that would go against the very nature of the project.
> Yes, I will not be using this site. Just giving my feedback and opinion on the UX just like you.
But you're not actually giving any useful feedback on the UX the person has implemented, you're giving feedback towards some UX that doesn't exist and won't exist as it's outside the scope of the project.
It's like someone showing you that they built a car for themselves, and your first comment is "but does it float in the sea?". No, of course it doesn't float, it's not a boat.
> some UX that doesn't exist and won't exist as it's outside the scope of the project
It seems to me removing scrolling is actually work as opposed to just letting the default behavior of the browser to prevail. I'm not saying there is no point in having a site with keyboard navigation as the primary mode of interaction. It's just that when you go out of your way to remove something that should be supported natively you're scope creeping.
If losing selection highlight is a problem just disable that feature only why mess with scrolling?
I think you’re being a little defensive. People might like the graphical design but not the control scheme. In that case I think it’s fair to say that. Sure it might intended as a keyboard site but that doesn’t mean the author couldn’t enhance in that, even pivot, if he wanted to.
To use your boat example: there is no point trying to sell kit cars if people are only interested in buying boats.
Ok, this is a pet project so the author might have no intention of taking his design and trying to monetise it. But as long as feedback is civil I can’t see why opposing opinions can’t be shared (and ignored if the author so chooses).
I know on my personal projects, comments that seem to miss the point often then inspire me to create new things. So I’m always interest in any feedback. Just as long as it’s not people moaning about the name lol
It is an implementation of HN that is for keyboard use - how is that hostile to people who want to use a mouse?
Use HN, or any of the 100's of clones/implementations that exist.
This whole "user hostile" thing is getting boring, not everything has to cater for everyone and their desires. This is a pet project being shown off for keyboard navigation - there is nothing "hostile" about that. At all.
I loved the keyboard navigation. Alt+H opens Firefox's Help menu for me however. I wanted to try using it for a while, but then I wanted to comment here, and well, it seems like commenting still has to be done from the normal interface... :)
I could not figure this out even after using the help dialog repeatedly, since I assumed "navigate" meant "scrolling up and down the page", and there were three shortcuts that actually mentioned comments.
Please work on this more, this is just such a pleasant interface! On the other hand, the criticism here in HN is also mostly correct. It should be more accessible, but definitely a great start!
Thank you! That's funny, when I started this project I actually wanted to build it for HN, Reddit and Twitter, but couldn"t find the time for it and scrapped that idea. Guess I should revisit that decision.
This is true. I recommend to not use keyboard tabbing while navigating throught the comments. Makes it a lot less confusing and you still do everything.
However, it's impossible to read longer comments this way. This comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28705415 in this very thread is too long to fit in my browser window, which is maximized on my 16" laptop. So far I'm just pressing O, but it still takes time. A scroll for long comments would be really welcomed.
Other than that, it's a very cool UI! I can see using it full-time and press O only when I want to reply. Actually, I just did :D
First of all, congratulations on shipping it! It's pretty cool.
Some feelings I had while using it, just in case it's useful to you:
- To me is a bit strange than when I'm focused on comments, by pressing Enter it opens the URL of the article (that it's not my focus right now).
- Also I would like to add comments, but I think in this version is still not possible.
- As others mention, it wouldn't hurt that those actions can be both done by mouse and keys (or maybe the title of the submission should be "HN with keyboard")
I like the colors and the blur effect, nice touch :)
1. In get why that might be a bit confusing. The problem is, you can't focus the article/post after opening the comments, so you would have to go back in order to open the link. I didn't find a better solution at the time, so I just left it like this. Maybe I just have to think a bit harder ;)
2. I mostly just read discussions that's why I didn't even consider a comment feature. But I'm definitely gonna look into that and see if it's possible.
3. Might be a good idea. I actually had a mouse/keyboard switch at some point but removed it because it was a bit buggy and confusing. Maybe I should rethink that.
As someone who browses the internet by default without any JavaScript enabled, I also find it jarring when websites do this.
I understand that some webapps absolutely need JavaScript to function, but I wish it was handled with a bit more tact than a completely blank page displaying a single sentence asking me to enable it. I'm not calling out op, twitter and quora do this too.
This is great! For stories with 100s of comments it's nice to start browsing from a collapsed view of top-level comments.
- Why is the Comments count shown only for the highlighted story?
- On Firefox Windows, pressing the Enter key on an item triggers a popup warning at the top of the page. Took me a few tries to notice what was going on.
- Alt + H triggers the Firefox Help menu for me :| Can you change that shortcut key to "?" instead? GMail, Github etc use "?".
- The green background for the comment text is a bit too dark.
- Is it just me or is the comment text not showing paragraph breaks?
- The zoom in transition when the comment text modal shows up just slows things down. If I'm going to load many comments in that view I'd rather it load instantly. Also, what's the purpose of this modal? There's a "Space -> Read" for the comment that I'm already reading. I don't get it.
1. I initially wanted to display as little information as possbile to keep it clean and prevent clutter, but I guess it wouldn't hurt to show at least the comments count.
2. Oh, I didn't notice that. Might be caused by the way the new tab is opened. Gonna look into that, thanks.
3. Good catch, gonna change that.
4. Do mean contrast wise?
5. You're right, the spacing between paragraphs is missing. That will get fixed.
6. Yea, I will probably increase the speed of the transition to match the rest of the UI.
The modal exists for reading longer comments. It's unnecessary for most, but during testing I found quite a lot of very long comments (especially in Ask HN) that didn't fit on the screen. Scrolling directly inside the comment felt weird, so I added the modal. It also increases the text size and makes it easier to read long paragraphs.
I was just thinking about this myself. It would be so awesome to add something like OAuth2!
But then I realized, this would break the subtle cohesion of the current model. Everyone has to specifically come back to news.yc to comment. Everyone has to use the HN design. I do wonder if this is intentional, or at least strategic - because the current approach enforces a certain perspective when commenting that *perhaps* might be broken, or at least made much much harder to maintain, by the fragmentation induced from being able to run off and build totally alternative interfaces.
It's just a thought. I'm not sure if this is just hot air.
Looking at reddit, whenever someone complains about degredation of discussion, somebody pops up and says "just use old.reddit.com". However, everyone else is still on new reddit, so even if you increase the quality of your submissions, the overall quality still drops.
I'm able to add comments using my current unofficial Android app. These apps just work around the requirement by issuing some sort of HTTP requests similar to the site itself.
It's great.
But.
Can you please give me an option to just select the entry as if it was a 'normal' menu instead of scrolling the whole page and keeping the 'cursor' steady at the top?
Thanks! This is something I initially tested during development but didn"t feel right for me, so I scrapped. But having an option to switch the mode might be a good idea.
Well done, works perfectly on Firefox 92 on Fedora 34. The smooth animations & responsiveness to key-presses are spot on! Can we please have Dark Mode?
Intitial impression: "oookay [click] let's have a look let's see how badly broken *this* HN frontend i--ooh. Oh, okay. Wow this is nice!"
And it truly is. There's something this honestly nails.
But after using it for few moments, I was able to crystallize what I perceived was "wrong" with the design: the mechanic of combining locality with spatiality means I completely lose sight of the bigger picture. I have a really bad memory and attention span, so I depend on constantly reading cues/senses of scale from my environment. As in, they need to be constantly there. (For example, the first thing I'd do if I ever used a Mac was make the scrollbars permanently visible.)
With this UI, the immediate and global focus (the only focus) is on the comment I'm reading right now. Paradoxically, the clear intuition is that this would reduce distraction and increase focus, but (at least for me) by only presenting individual details I cannot establish and maintain orientation about how big a thread is, the structure of it (a few large mega-subthreads, or subthread islands, or hundreds of upvotes but only like 15 total comments), etc.
I tend to take full advantage of scroooooling through and cherry-picking comments to read at random. I've long dreamed of solutions that provide a rigid framework that ensure I read every comment, but I've kind of accepted that such approaches just don't work in practice; they require a tremendous amount of discipline to use (almost like grammar-proofreading a book).
A UI that has me consider every single comment as globally important ("it's the only thing on the screen at this exact moment"), both a) maxes out my attention span very quickly and b) feeds me a non-representative, breadth-first view of the discussion, because I find there's a nontrivial effort associated with needing to hit the right arrow key to expand the comments: I Have No Idea How Many Subcomments Are Hiding In There nO I aM NoT GoInG iN ThErE ThAt iS ScArY. For whatever reason (???) it's physiologically easier to just keep hitting Down instead.
This is honestly novel and interesting - and because of how well-executed this is, I can say that if you were to ever to consider tackling global orientation (I'm imagining spotlight/expose type zooming here, but I strongly suspect that would be just as disorientating as not being able to vaguely internalize the bigger picture at all), I would be very interested to see.
Agreed with pretty much everything here. It's a nice UI, looks good, is smooth, well done overall.
However, it doesn't fit how I read HN or Reddit - I tend to scan and be drawn to keywords and visually interesting parts of the thread. This type of UI turns the comments into a TODO list of indeterminate length.
I'm surprised at how smooth this is and am really considering this as a replacement of the HN page for me.
The only thing I'd love to have added would be an inline mode, where replies to comments are also shown on the top level of the comment section, but indented, just like it's on YC's HN.
More things:
- Always show comments count
- Reloading a comment section should not bring you back to the front page (clear entire state).
I'm not sure about an inline mode because that would kind of defeat the initial purpose of this app. But, I did write it down and will see if there are others who would like this.
There is now an option to always show the comments count.
I'm currently working on exactly that issue. One of the next updates will add support for changes to the browser history and URL so you will be able to reload or share the URL at any point.
246 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 271 ms ] threadI like to use the mouse anyway. Each post has the number of comments, something like "123 comments ->" Can you make the number of comments and the arrow clickable? Also, the "<- Back" inside each post.
It I'm reading a comment, the author and "open" should be clickable too. I didn't understand what "open" means, perhaps change it to "open in HN".
I'll consider changing it to "Open in HN". It is more clear about what it does but it's also longer and maybe a bit redundant.
> If you don't like it, just use Hacker News.
Yes, I will not be using this site. Just giving my feedback and opinion on the UX just like you.
If someone shows me a project for keyboard navigation, I won't complain that there is no mouse navigation, as that would go against the very nature of the project.
> Yes, I will not be using this site. Just giving my feedback and opinion on the UX just like you.
But you're not actually giving any useful feedback on the UX the person has implemented, you're giving feedback towards some UX that doesn't exist and won't exist as it's outside the scope of the project.
It's like someone showing you that they built a car for themselves, and your first comment is "but does it float in the sea?". No, of course it doesn't float, it's not a boat.
How is that useful feedback to this project?
It seems to me removing scrolling is actually work as opposed to just letting the default behavior of the browser to prevail. I'm not saying there is no point in having a site with keyboard navigation as the primary mode of interaction. It's just that when you go out of your way to remove something that should be supported natively you're scope creeping.
If losing selection highlight is a problem just disable that feature only why mess with scrolling?
To use your boat example: there is no point trying to sell kit cars if people are only interested in buying boats.
Ok, this is a pet project so the author might have no intention of taking his design and trying to monetise it. But as long as feedback is civil I can’t see why opposing opinions can’t be shared (and ignored if the author so chooses).
I know on my personal projects, comments that seem to miss the point often then inspire me to create new things. So I’m always interest in any feedback. Just as long as it’s not people moaning about the name lol
Use HN, or any of the 100's of clones/implementations that exist.
This whole "user hostile" thing is getting boring, not everything has to cater for everyone and their desires. This is a pet project being shown off for keyboard navigation - there is nothing "hostile" about that. At all.
very addicting
Other than that, it's a very cool UI! I can see using it full-time and press O only when I want to reply. Actually, I just did :D
Wow, thank you very much! :D
Some feelings I had while using it, just in case it's useful to you:
- To me is a bit strange than when I'm focused on comments, by pressing Enter it opens the URL of the article (that it's not my focus right now).
- Also I would like to add comments, but I think in this version is still not possible.
- As others mention, it wouldn't hurt that those actions can be both done by mouse and keys (or maybe the title of the submission should be "HN with keyboard")
I like the colors and the blur effect, nice touch :)
1. In get why that might be a bit confusing. The problem is, you can't focus the article/post after opening the comments, so you would have to go back in order to open the link. I didn't find a better solution at the time, so I just left it like this. Maybe I just have to think a bit harder ;)
2. I mostly just read discussions that's why I didn't even consider a comment feature. But I'm definitely gonna look into that and see if it's possible.
3. Might be a good idea. I actually had a mouse/keyboard switch at some point but removed it because it was a bit buggy and confusing. Maybe I should rethink that.
Thanks for your feedback!
I understand that some webapps absolutely need JavaScript to function, but I wish it was handled with a bit more tact than a completely blank page displaying a single sentence asking me to enable it. I'm not calling out op, twitter and quora do this too.
- Why is the Comments count shown only for the highlighted story?
- On Firefox Windows, pressing the Enter key on an item triggers a popup warning at the top of the page. Took me a few tries to notice what was going on.
- Alt + H triggers the Firefox Help menu for me :| Can you change that shortcut key to "?" instead? GMail, Github etc use "?".
- The green background for the comment text is a bit too dark.
- Is it just me or is the comment text not showing paragraph breaks?
- The zoom in transition when the comment text modal shows up just slows things down. If I'm going to load many comments in that view I'd rather it load instantly. Also, what's the purpose of this modal? There's a "Space -> Read" for the comment that I'm already reading. I don't get it.
2. Oh, I didn't notice that. Might be caused by the way the new tab is opened. Gonna look into that, thanks.
3. Good catch, gonna change that.
4. Do mean contrast wise?
5. You're right, the spacing between paragraphs is missing. That will get fixed.
6. Yea, I will probably increase the speed of the transition to match the rest of the UI. The modal exists for reading longer comments. It's unnecessary for most, but during testing I found quite a lot of very long comments (especially in Ask HN) that didn't fit on the screen. Scrolling directly inside the comment felt weird, so I added the modal. It also increases the text size and makes it easier to read long paragraphs.
Thank you very much for your feedback!
Regarding 4, yep the contrast is less. Hard to make black text stand out against shades of green. An even lighter shade might work.
Reminds me of my own Chrome extension, Refined Hacker News [1], with almost identical keybindings built into the HN interface. Neat coincidence :)
[1]: https://github.com/plibither8/refined-hacker-news#on-items-a...
But then I realized, this would break the subtle cohesion of the current model. Everyone has to specifically come back to news.yc to comment. Everyone has to use the HN design. I do wonder if this is intentional, or at least strategic - because the current approach enforces a certain perspective when commenting that *perhaps* might be broken, or at least made much much harder to maintain, by the fragmentation induced from being able to run off and build totally alternative interfaces.
It's just a thought. I'm not sure if this is just hot air.
Looking at reddit, whenever someone complains about degredation of discussion, somebody pops up and says "just use old.reddit.com". However, everyone else is still on new reddit, so even if you increase the quality of your submissions, the overall quality still drops.
And it truly is. There's something this honestly nails.
But after using it for few moments, I was able to crystallize what I perceived was "wrong" with the design: the mechanic of combining locality with spatiality means I completely lose sight of the bigger picture. I have a really bad memory and attention span, so I depend on constantly reading cues/senses of scale from my environment. As in, they need to be constantly there. (For example, the first thing I'd do if I ever used a Mac was make the scrollbars permanently visible.)
With this UI, the immediate and global focus (the only focus) is on the comment I'm reading right now. Paradoxically, the clear intuition is that this would reduce distraction and increase focus, but (at least for me) by only presenting individual details I cannot establish and maintain orientation about how big a thread is, the structure of it (a few large mega-subthreads, or subthread islands, or hundreds of upvotes but only like 15 total comments), etc.
I tend to take full advantage of scroooooling through and cherry-picking comments to read at random. I've long dreamed of solutions that provide a rigid framework that ensure I read every comment, but I've kind of accepted that such approaches just don't work in practice; they require a tremendous amount of discipline to use (almost like grammar-proofreading a book).
A UI that has me consider every single comment as globally important ("it's the only thing on the screen at this exact moment"), both a) maxes out my attention span very quickly and b) feeds me a non-representative, breadth-first view of the discussion, because I find there's a nontrivial effort associated with needing to hit the right arrow key to expand the comments: I Have No Idea How Many Subcomments Are Hiding In There nO I aM NoT GoInG iN ThErE ThAt iS ScArY. For whatever reason (???) it's physiologically easier to just keep hitting Down instead.
This is honestly novel and interesting - and because of how well-executed this is, I can say that if you were to ever to consider tackling global orientation (I'm imagining spotlight/expose type zooming here, but I strongly suspect that would be just as disorientating as not being able to vaguely internalize the bigger picture at all), I would be very interested to see.
However, it doesn't fit how I read HN or Reddit - I tend to scan and be drawn to keywords and visually interesting parts of the thread. This type of UI turns the comments into a TODO list of indeterminate length.
I was actually thinking about adding support for reddit. Might add that in the future.
The only thing I'd love to have added would be an inline mode, where replies to comments are also shown on the top level of the comment section, but indented, just like it's on YC's HN.
More things:
- Always show comments count
- Reloading a comment section should not bring you back to the front page (clear entire state).
I'm not sure about an inline mode because that would kind of defeat the initial purpose of this app. But, I did write it down and will see if there are others who would like this.
There is now an option to always show the comments count.
I'm currently working on exactly that issue. One of the next updates will add support for changes to the browser history and URL so you will be able to reload or share the URL at any point.
You can check the changelog if you are interested: https://haxplore.sleekplan.app/changelog