HN Explorer

Show HN: HackerNew for Chrome (chrome.google.com)

150 points by tommoor ↗ HN
I've been working on and off on a Chrome Extension for Hacker News, the extension focusses on improved usability rather than design. I can almost guarantee that after a day you won't want to go back to regular Hacker News. Give it a try, features include:

- Improved readability - Quick inline replies from comments page - Quick profiles with social network info when hovering over usernames - Filtering of stories based on terms and phrases / domain or user - Endless scrolling - Collapsible comment threads - Social sharing for Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Buffer

Forks, improvements and comments welcome: https://github.com/tommoor/HackerNew

91 comments

[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 147 ms ] thread
tommoor
I've been working on and off on this for a little while, the extension focusses on improved usability rather than design. I can almost guarantee that after a day you won't want to go back to regular Hacker News. Give it a try, features include:

- Improved readability

- Quick inline replies from comments page

- Quick profiles with social network info when hovering over usernames

- Filtering of stories based on terms and phrases / domain or user (try filtering out negativity!)

- Endless scrolling

- Collapsible comment threads

- Social sharing for Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Buffer

Forks, improvements and comments always welcome: https://github.com/tommoor/HackerNew

Jimmie
I've been playing with something like this too. What I really want brought over from the Reddit Enhancement Suite is the ability to hide posts and to see updated comment counts.
dwhly
"I can almost guarantee that after a day you won't want to go back..."

Unfortunately I probably won't make it to a day or two. What you really strive for as a designer is more like "I can guarantee that after 30 seconds you won't be going back". I can tell you that I'm already uninstalling it. Don't change the styling-- or at least leave the information density that we've got w/ HN now.

SoftwareMaven
I don't mind the idea of changing HN's styling if it is easier to read. Unfortunately, something in the contrast with the plugin makes it much, much harder to read. If I could choose different styles (including a "native" option), I would be happier.

I agree with another poster that the share link should not be on the right side of the links below a story: that is memory wired to be the place to click for the comments (either that, or give me a good reason to change that memory).

I like everything else and would use it, notwithstanding the contrast issue. I'll leave it installed and enable it every once in a while to see how it progresses.

driverdan
Neat. I started working on a bookmarklet to improve HN last year called Hacker News Enhancement Suite:

https://github.com/driverdan/Hacker-News-Enhancement-Suite

I never got the code far enough to announce / release. The long term goal was to also make plugins.

etcet
And I actually posted my extension also called 'Hacker News Enhancement Suite' yesterday but no one saw/cared.

https://github.com/etcet/HNES http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3933090

I cannot say how angry/sad/confused this makes me :(

rkudeshi
Try writing a blog post about it and submit again (preferably later at night, when there's less competition.)

Also, "Show HN" seems to get a better response than other alternatives.

Fizzadar
Just installed it - loving the added spacing, increased font sizes/etc; it makes far better use of the full screen.

I doubt I'll ever be uninstalling this :)

cocoflunchy
> it makes far better use of the full screen. Not for us poor laptop owners! It's actually the exact opposite :/
driverdan
Can you add privacy details? It looks like this is using a 3rd party service for social profile data.
tommoor
Hey,

The extension queries Google's social graph API to gather information about users profiles - you can find details here: https://developers.google.com/social-graph/

polshaw
That link goes to:

     'The Google Social Graph API is no longer available'
Anyway, i'm not keen on that. Infinite scroll and CSS should be options, too.

Personally, all i really want is collapsible comments, inline replies, and hiding stories

Anyone know of a script/extension that does just that??

muyuu
I'd also like to know more about that.

"Your data on hackerne.ws and news.ycombinator.com" sounds very generic and I'm not knowledgeable on Chrome extensions. Does that include POST requests? how about cookies and passwords?

christiangenco
Ooo, this is quite nice. I like all of the inline features you added (though inline comments aren't currently working for me --- scratch that, they were just really slow).

Nicely done! I predict, as with all HN re-themes, that someone will soon comment about how article density is less than on standard HN, so I took the liberty of adding it to your GitHub issues :)

tommoor
Haha, thankyou very much. Hopefully the endless scrolling takes away some of the pain of more readable titles ;-)
keva161
Nice but it doesn't work if you visit http://hackerne.ws/

Only http://news.ycombinator.com/

tommoor
I didn't even know that URL existed - i'll add support in the next update :-)
keva161
I added support for you and submitted it to github :)
tommoor
Merged and pushed to Chrome webstore ;-)

Cheers!

etcet
You're also missing news.ycombinator.net and all the https variants.
gegenschall
Funny. For me it's the other way round. Does not work on news.ycombinator.com but on hackerne.ws
vasco
I would use it if you didn't change the css, and didn't make share the rightmost link. Also, that "block this guy" popup is really pervasive when you're just roaming around with the mouse. Other than that, really nice work!
tommoor
Hey, thanks for the feedback!

I wonder why the filter popup is showing a lot for you, it should only appear if you hover over the 'x' symbol on the far right - this should be out of the way for most browsing.

vasco
Maybe its just me, I'm always moving the mouse around and selecting stuff while I read. Just so that this post isn't useless, the reason I complained about the css is that I think the light orange bg with black fg is easier on the eyes. I liked that you increased the titles' sizes but the rest of the links are still very small! I browse hn with 150% zoom full-time so having good sized titles and small sized other links or just really oversized everything is kinda crappy!
sushi
Same suggestion. I like the overall improvements but please don't force the styling. Make it as an option that users can check to disable default styling of HN.
tommoor
Definitely considering making this an option in the next version
gbaygon
> I would use it if you didn't change the css

Same here. It seems very useful but styling should be optional, some of us realy like how good ol' HN looks.

betterth
The CSS needs some cleaning up, I can see a few little issues, but I personally like the new style a tad better. I get the whole hackernews/reddit meme of "thou shalt design the most basic UI and never change it", but these days it feels more like an "engineers idea of a minimum viable UI" instead of a "well-designed, minimalist, useful UI".

This looks good, and while I won't call it better quite yet, I have no strong desire to turn it off, good work!

EDIT: On the mainpage, I dislike the X's that are attached to the right, they're near invisible and then you rollover and all kinds of contrasty things pop up. Also, I dislike the rolldowns for user names. They're unresponsive and you have to click to make them roll-up. As such, they get in the way.

tommoor
Thanks for the feedback,

The crosses are definitely supposed to be hidden away and not something that you would use all of the time. For the username rolldown's, it is a shame they can't work a bit faster but it's just the nature of the beast - I've added a delay so it is harder to trigger them by accident.

betterth
I think you may have misunderstood: If I rollover a username, it drops down a popup. If I move away from the username, the pop-up remains. It notices my onMouseOver to instantly rolldown, but ignores my onMouseOut when I leave.

This disparity in behavior is frustrating, why is activation onMouseOver, but deactivation requires a full click white space to change focus? It should be click on/click off or roll on/roll off, IMO.

vibragiel
I agree about the share link. The "X comments" link is probably the most clicked in HN, and everybody expects it to be the rightmost. It has confused me several times already.

Nevertheless, I'm definitely keeping this extension!

udp
Looks nice. I'd quite like to see a poll with the various alternative HN themes to see what most people are using.
tzury
This is my HN for Chrome http://imgur.com/dPcjC

Given my default sans font is set to Droid Sans, all I needed to do was simply zoom-in (Ctrl ++) twice and chrome keep it this way between log-ins and recently between machines as well.

tommoor
The extension is mainly about additional functionality and ease of use over styling, let me know if you give it a try!
bmuon
Wow! The infinite scrolling feature just made me a lot less productive at work. I used to just look at the homepage...

Feature suggestion: could you add a different link to the discussion page? Something more prominent and easier to click?

irrationalfab
The only missing feature that prevents it to become the ultimate HN extension is to show an icon in the address bar that links the a web page to the HN thread (if available).

Keep up the great work!

josscrowcroft
Congrats Tom! Been looking forward to using this.
crisnoble
Endless scrolling is very cool, until you try to click one of the links on the bottom or use the search.
tommoor
I did consider moving search to the top - what do you think? What stopped me was wanting to augment rather than completely change the current HN experience.
crisnoble
I understand your goal of not completely changing the HN design. However, as the extension works right now, it is literally impossible for me to click the links on the bottom. I can see them for a microsecond if I scroll to the bottom but they instantly get pushed down by a wave of new stories.
leemac
Fantastic work! I'm liking the different feel of the site. Infinite scrolling is a big plus too. Curious to see what else you can do with this.
orky56
A few points:

1) There's a subtle difference between the white background of the extension and the border of the browser. We're talking just enough to notice but not enough to quickly see the contrast. I'd say make it completely the same or exaggerate the contrast a bit more.

2) Any way to address the tiny buttons for up vote/down vote? They are so small that I am always afraid that I'll hit the wrong one. Perhaps side by side or more spacing between them.

3) Just for discussion sake, do you think when sharing it should be mentioned that it's come from HN?

4) In-line comments are awesome! How about using a sidebar on the HN homepage for something like preview or better yet, to display comments for the current article with similar styling to preview in Google search results?

5) Endless scroll on the "Comments" page seems to be broken.

I don't know if I can ever go back to the standard HN....Great job!

EvilTerran
Damn... I've been working on a userscript to do, well, pretty much what this does; I'd completed thread folding, and was just getting stuck into AJAXy "more" links and reply forms.

Oh well, time for a new hobby project.

[edit: Incidentally, do you find the tables-within-tables-within-tables structure of HN, with some arbitrary variations between pages, as infuriating as I do? Or am I doing something wrong?]

tommoor
That's all part of the fun ;-)
EvilTerran
I've been awfully tempted to have my userscript just completely rip the page layout apart & re-assemble it properly as styled divs, actually. I might still do that.
etcet
As someone who just wrote their own extension for HN, I think that's the right way to go about things. Tables are such a pain in the ass and I there were multiple times where I had to talk myself into 'staying the course' and just getting it done rather than starting from scratch with a more sane approach.

I think if you could create a nice minimalist table-parser base it would be useful for any future browser extensions.

EvilTerran
Actually, that's really a rather good idea. I'll be sure to Show HN when it's done!
ealfert
I tried to contribute to this thread but my IP seems to have been blocked after submitting my comment. I included a list of 6 Chrome extensions and their URL that in my opinion improve the usability and features of HN. I'm afraid to submit it again since I don't want the current Squid proxy's IP being blocked also and then I won't be able to read HN until I find a different IP I can route through. Anyone know how long IP blocks last?
ssn
Missing expand/collapse comment threads.
cocoflunchy
It's great, except that I can now only see 12 links on the home page... And infinite scrolling is good, but how do you now search ? All the bottom links go further down when you scroll the page.
joering2
Never had a time to give my respect to HN by building my own bootstrap and adding more features (I believe more options viewing HN, the better) but every time something like this comes around HN I follow the thread.

This is what I learnt so far:

- do not change fonts, colors styles.

- do not try to add cool up to date, buttons, etc - most users just got used to the way it is right now - do not add anything between rank position and title. no additional icons, etc. folks here got used to scanning HN certain way and more white space makes it harder to read

How would my HN bootstrap look like?

- wouldnt touch the outlook and add minimum additionals: after # of comment I would add ajax-driven "follow" for the post and "follow for replies" - in threads were there are hundreds of responses its hard to catch up with whats new (who wrote new reply); I know you can lookup your profile to see comments related to yours, but I find it kind of hard it this way and you have to leave to post screen.

- add highlighters to responses. karma is good and many times interesting folks have high karma (duh!) - I would add highlighters (opt in/out) for high karma users when they type response so when I scroll long thread and am limited with reading time, I could at least see posts coming from high karma users

- social features: would add IRC, follow hacker (notify me when he posts new stuff, or write a comments), but would never add all the fb/twitter crap. imho hn being less popular is better. this community is awesome as it is

- would do it never ending scrolling like you did, BUT also make it as refreshless as possible - would load stuff through ajax, also monitor the hottest subjects and preload theirs comments in hidden div so when you click "comments" it would show up instantly and just added missing comments that took place from the moment of last reload (all reloads would be silent ajax-driven) - this would give you feeling that loading data is extremely damn fast.

This is for a good start. One day I will get there as I want to learn Python or Ruby :)

platz
agree on not changing fonts, colors, styles, buttons ...
joering2
Yeah. I think lots of people find HN design perfect the way it is and its hard to move on. Its like another Craiglist, I guess.

Btw: my post gets lots of upvotes -- perhaps someone could design some of the features I mentioned...

sgt
So I installed it, but it's not showing up in "Apps" in a new Chrome tab. What am I doing wrong?
cfontes
Please remove this CSS changes, they look terrible.

The features are nice thought.