

 A better mobile version of HN. Please review my weekend project - ronnier
http://toadjaw.com/hn

======
andrewljohnson
Here I am reading hn on a Droid and boy is it terrible. Text too small. Text
poorly wrapped. Buttons misclicked all over the place. So bless you sir. With
half a billion smart phones sold in just the last couple of years, this is
overdue.

You still need to bump up the fonts on the FP about 2 points. On mobile, favor
horsey big usable text over any concession to style.

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Tichy
For some reason I can not zoom on that page on my Nexus One. Is that
intentional, and how is it done? I can zoom on other web sites.

I guess links could be bigger - I tend to zoom on web sites to hit the smaller
links, and since it is not possible on your page, it might become an issue.

~~~
gregschlom
On the iPhone, and I think also on Android devices, you can prevent a page
from being zoomed withe the following meta tag :

<meta name="viewport" content="width=320; initial-scale=1.0; maximum-
scale=1.0; user-scalable=0;"/>

But this tag isn't being used here, as far I can see.

~~~
mcav
(that tag is on the site)

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franck
The 'Article Text' is incredibly useful on old mobiles and slow connections.

I will now be able to read actual articles, not just HN comments. Thank you!

~~~
ronnier
You're welcome. I'm happy to hear that it's useful.

I'm actually using that for a bigger project that I'm working on. While
working on it, and having done so HTML processing with it, I realized that it
wouldn't take me to long to wire up a mobile version of HN that uses it.

You can pass any URL through it on this form: <http://toadjaw.com/article>

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mmelin
Thank you! I've been using iCombinator but half the time I get a Python
exception when loading comments. Hope this will work better. Cheers.

~~~
ronnier
Yes that was some frustration with me too. I do this: if the connection times
out (10 seconds) while reading HN, it'll serve the last successful scrape of
HN. That's the reason I put the last fetched date on the page, I don't want
anybody to be worried that they are receiving a stale version.

The comment pages don't yet serve cached pages if the fetch fails... working
on that.

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knipknap
Cool, but doesn't look much different than a simple feed in google reader
really.

~~~
ronnier
Like Jakob pointed out, I added the ability to pull the text of the linked
article, which still needs some tweaking but works for most normal blog/news
articles. It really makes articles readable on phones. It's based arc90's
readability.

In addition, I added in the ability to read the comments and made them
collapsible (like reddit).

But yes, if you only want the list of the front page links, the RSS will do.

I plan on adding more features soon: -Make comments sortable by date or points
-More extensive caching of the comment pages along with the article text (in
case either go down) -Improve the overall look and feel

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phunel
Would love to see the text displayed inversely - whether in traditional
terminal style (green text on black background) or something similar to
arc90's readability style.

~~~
ronnier
That should be doable with just CSS. I put on a "settings" page on my TODO
list to do just that.

~~~
phunel
Sounds great. I'll be looking forward to the settings update which I assume
will be accessible via a different url (versus user controlled setting)? I.e.
toadjaw.com/hninverse Again, nice implementation and it's become my default as
of now.

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johns
Please add proper support for discussion (Ask HN, etc) posts. This is my #1
annoyance of iCombinator. Too many taps and backs to view the question then
view the thread.

~~~
bdotdub
Anything in particular you were thinking of? I'm not sure I quite get the
feedback.

~~~
johns
The OP discussion text is not in the same view as the comments. Otherwise, I
love iCombinator!

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gregschlom
It would be very nice someone purchased a more rememberable url...
hnmobile.info is available, for example. I guess that would do the trick. No
need of a .com tld here.

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sjs382
<http://www.icombinator.net/> I really wish there was a way to comment and
vote from the interface, though.

~~~
ronnier
I really like icombinator but I wanted to address some problems and add new
features (View the article text, collapse/expand comments, and return to the
previous position when using the browsers back button).

~~~
bdotdub
This is awesome! (iCombinator author here :) Looking forward to the new
features coming to your app!

~~~
ronnier
Thanks a lot! My first attempt with mobile specific web pages. A lot to learn.

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twohanded
I use a mobile browser (Atomic) which has great support for tabs- therefore I
liked icombinator because it would by default open artcle links in a new tab.

Is there a way that you could have an option stored in a cookie that would
determine whether or not to open those links in a new tab?

Very excited that you are working on this project and nice work so far!

~~~
ronnier
That sounds very doable. I'll eventually have a settings page to set those
kinds of options. Thanks for using it!

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buster
Yes, HN could really need a mobile version. Also, is there some official API?
Could people write mobile apps based on HN?

~~~
mhansen
The official API is to scrape the HTML

~~~
buster
that's no API. It's subject to change whenever they wish.

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tom_ilsinszki
An icon for iPhone users would be nice...

EDIT: Oh, and thank you! It really seems to be better than iCombinator.

~~~
ronnier
Do you know where to find a HN icon in ico format?

EDIT: Duh... HN itself has one. I'll use it.

EDIT: Ok, I added it. Thanks for reminding me about this.

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wmf
I guess by mobile you mean iPhone; it looks pretty poor on Fennec/Maemo or
probably any landscape device.

~~~
omaranto
If it is any consolation it doesn't look very nice on the iPhone in landscape
either.

~~~
ronnier
I fixed the landscape problem. It turns out that adding -webkit-text-size-
adjust:none; prevents the text from enlarging when rotating the phone to
landscape. Adding that appears to have fixed it.

------
omaranto
Looks nice! You should steal my favorite iCombinator feature, though: the
Instapaper links. Also, the Article text links all return errors, but I'll
take it on faith they produce or will produce in the future some easy to read
version of article text.

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quizbiz
How does this work?

~~~
ronnier
For the home page, I request the HTML from HN, process it, and create a
collection of elements that represent a HN news item: URL, Title, # of
comments, ID, Posted By, Date, and so on. Then use that to generate the new
HTML. I cache that for 200 seconds and store a copy in the event that I can't
read the HTML from HN.

Works just about the same way for the comments , except it adds some
additional functionality like collapsing comments. With the nature of comments
being nested, a recursive function worked really well on rendering the output.

The article text functionality uses the algorithm from arc 90's readability
project, which is in javascript. I used the main idea behind their readability
algorithm for this, except mine runs server side (C#) where theirs is all done
on the client.

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gaiusparx
I actually wish the main site stylesheet can be changed so that the white
columns on left and right sides does not show up in mobile screen. This will
save spaces, make the text bigger and make navigation/zooming easier on small
screen.

~~~
ronnier
For the front page or the comment pages?

~~~
gaiusparx
Both.

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joe-mccann
Was planning on doing something similar using YQL. Nice one.

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augustl
Bookmarked. It is now possible to click the comments link on an iPad without
missing 70% of the time.

Edit: forget it. The links are target="_blank".

~~~
ronnier
I just removed it. I was wondering if that would turn people off. Thanks for
the feedback. Now that you mention it, I really don't like links opening in a
new window/tab either.

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steve19
Feature request: Add the time that has elapsed since last update. For example:

"Last fetched 5/30/2010 8:23:51 AM PST (17 minutes ago)"

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s3graham
I can recommend the HN app on Android market too.

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underdown
Works and looks great on my gphone.

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sdp
Could you easily add duckduckgo style infinite scrolling?

~~~
ronnier
Yeah, shouldn't be hard. I'll add that to my list.

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eande
good readable on my iPhone, better than what I have seen so far, nice weekend
project. I will keep using it for now. Thank you

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nikeshhayaran
nice..but looks little bit dull.... anyways nice work..

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steve19
Looks great!

