This could revolutionize social news sites. Imagine if the average reddit/digg/slashdot user were to actually read the article he was commenting on first.
I prefer looking only at the information that is relevant to the current task. Having everything on one page reduces the time to switch contexts, but increases the effort required to process information in the current context.
Maybe something that made it easy to switch between contexts while preserving information hiding would be preferable. (keyboard shortcuts perhaps)
Good Suggestion. I could create a feature that would hide the news panel when you click on an article link, maybe turn it to a thin orange vertical bar running along the left side? Maybe a toggle preference feature, such as clicking comments above the article expands comments but collapse the article? Definitely things I could work in as user preference choices.
Dang it, I had this same idea a while back, except with pre-loading the pages so you can mouseover titles on the left and the story instantly pops up on the right.
This would help get through Reddit way faster -- just slowly move the mouse downward and zoom through all the [PIC] and misleading title submissions.
If anybody's up for it (my own CSS/JS skills aren't much use), you could probably build an online, non-Greasemonkey version of this with an app I've been working on: http://feedvolley.com/
(Basically it lets you take an RSS feed and present it in HTML templates, with whatever Javascript/HTML/etc you want. If you have any questions or need any help feel free to email me at niryariv@gmail.com)
Can you also put the list of links in an iframe of the same size as the article pane?
So that the browser window does not get a scroll bar, and instead you have two scroll bars - one for each pane.
And BTW it's quite possible to have it auto size the iframe using CSS. You should not need to have it fixed.
Set:
HTML, BODY { height: 100%; }
Then give the two iframes height's of 100%, and add a padding to the article iframe giving you space for the two orange bars, which you put in place with position fixed (either on top, or on bottom, as needed.)
i.e. if each bar is 10px high, then either do padding-top: 20px; (space for two bars), or padding: 10px 0px; (10 on top and on bottom)
Hope that helps.
Oh, also get rid of the padding/margin around the body.
I like the idea a lot. The only thing I'd like to see in it is the option of having the sites stacked horizontally instead of vertically next to each other. Maybe I'm just weird but I find it easier to read something when there's two or three lines per paragraph instead of seven or eight. Less likely to get cross eyed and all..
It appears that when there is an article listed with 2 separate links in the title, it then doesn't auto populate the comments panel correctly. Clicking on the comments link for the comments you wish to read works properly still.
Nice script! I quite like it... though its too early to tell whether or not it'll become my preferred method of hacker newsing.
One big issue (may have been tarkin2's problem), but an easy one to fix, is that news.ycombinator.org also points to hacker news, but your script is only active on .com!
Another thing: is there any way you could set the height of the open comments/article frame to the height of the browser viewport (minus 25px for the header)? this gets rid of the annoying problem of scrolling all the way to the bottom of an article (or comments), and then having to switch focus to the main frame just to scroll to see the bottom of the internal frame.
Help! I installed it, even restarted ff3, and it displays when i right click on the monkey, but i don't see a change... i'm on 1024x748 if that makes a difference.
hu, I'm not really sure why it wouldn't work. As far as external resources, it pulls jQuery off of the Google AJAX Library CDN. Maybe something is blocking it from getting the jQuery script?
Did you edit the screen size preference in the code? Maybe an extra character got tacked in there or forgotten.
Yeah, I noticed that after click on the "More" link and browsing the second page of articles, that I ran into some problems with the comments bar. Sometimes it takes clicking on the comments link for the article. I will look into fixing this.
