

Tell HN: HNdroid, Hacker News android client - gluegadget
http://gluegadget.com/hndroid/
.apk: http://gluegadget.com/hndroid/HNdroid.apk<p>Screenshots: http://www.flickr.com/photos/amir_mohammad/sets/72157624870942817/
======
whalesalad
Diggin' the app :) My OCD took over and couldn't stand having the simple HN
icon in my launcher so I took the pleasure of making one :)

I did two variants. One is a bit more traditional, while the other matches the
name of the app more.

V1: <http://dl.dropbox.com/u/104495/HN/hndroid_app_icon.png>

V2:
[http://dl.dropbox.com/u/104495/HN/hndroid_app_icon_variant_2...](http://dl.dropbox.com/u/104495/HN/hndroid_app_icon_variant_2.png)

In the spirit of open source, here is the PSD:
<http://dl.dropbox.com/u/104495/HN/hndroid_app_icon.psd>

By the way, I've never actually made a production Android app icon before so I
don't know if you can just drop it in or not but enjoy :)

~~~
nuclear_eclipse
Best part is that if you use LauncherPro, you can edit the icon on your home
screen to use one of these images instead of the one specified by the apk. :)

~~~
whalesalad
I do use LauncherPro :D The pro version actually! Great $2.99 app on Android.

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gluegadget
Here's the source code: <http://github.com/amir/HNdroid>

At the first I thought I'd better clean-up the code, fix some bugs, add
features requested here, and add some comments before releasing the code, but
I then thought it'd better to release the code as it's in the released build.

~~~
chewbranca
Thanks!

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CGamesPlay
Here's a QR code for the APK. You should toss it on the page.

[http://qrcode.kaywa.com/img.php?s=5&d=http%3A%2F%2Fglueg...](http://qrcode.kaywa.com/img.php?s=5&d=http%3A%2F%2Fgluegadget.com%2Fhndroid%2FHNdroid.apk)

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ctrager
I concede defeat. gluegadget's app is better than mine:
[http://ifdefined.com/blog/post/A-Hacker-News-app-for-
Android...](http://ifdefined.com/blog/post/A-Hacker-News-app-for-Android.aspx)

~~~
ronnier
And better in a major way than my <http://ihackernews.com> and
<http://api.ihackernews.com>, in that authentication is done locally on the
device.

Good work gluegadget!

~~~
cosmok
I love ihackernews! The integration with ViewText makes it a perfect choice to
read HN stories on my phone. Thanks and Great Job!

------
jroid
Great app. Can you please add a "Read later button", that will save it to
Instapaper/ Read it later/ Delicious/ download to SD. (the option of where to
save could be configurable). Thanks.

~~~
nuclear_eclipse
Even better would be to hook into the system's already existing Share intents,
so that any app already on the phone set up to share information could be used
to handle this. Eg, the Hard Copy app (excellent Instapaper app written by an
HN member) hooks into that list, so I can save links to Instapaper from email,
browser, etc.

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tomjen3
Any change one can get to see the source? I am not really happy installing
stuff from random locations on the internet and give it my password (no
offence, just a rule of tomb).

~~~
dogas
Leads to another discussion, should HN support openid login, via google or any
other openid provider? That way I wouldn't have to remember yet another
password.

If that were the case however, I have yet to see a mobile (iphone, android)
app that does openid authentication nicely.

What would really be interesting is tying openid to a hardware identifier in a
mobile phone...

~~~
abraham
HN does support OpenID login.

~~~
jmillikin
I've never been able to get HN's OpenID login to work -- it used to work at
some point, but when I log in, I just get the error message:

"Bad OpenID login."

If I log in to ClickPass first, it sends me to a screen where I can enter my
HN username/password -- but when I fill out _that_ form, I'm taken to <
<http://news.ycombinator.com/openid_merge> >, which just says "Unknown."

From this experience, I assume the OpenID support in HN is more of an
afterthought than a real implementation.

~~~
yock
At the risk of similarly being voted down, I'm experiencing the same error.
Trying to associate an OpenID with my HN account results in a return of
"Unknown" from the openid_merge link.

------
sssparkkk
Seems to work very well! Great job.

Btw, 'successfull login :)' should be spelled without the double 'll'.

Edit: on second thought, I'd really like to be able to see the amount of
comments in the overview. And perhaps even a small visual difference between
opened-before and never seen yet articles...

~~~
gluegadget
Thanks for suggestions, I'll see if I can put the comments count somewhere in
the layout.

And Sorry for the typo :(

------
extension
Humbly requesting OpenID support, and BTW here's how you do it:

Open a browser view to the login page, wait for the HN cookie to show up, then
close the browser and use the cookie to scrape the site.

I have all this implemented in a client I was working on. I'll share the code
if you're interested.

~~~
Klonoar
I'd personally be very interested in seeing this code.

~~~
extension
ok

<http://github.com/jedediah/HackerTouch>

------
edanm
I added HNdroid to Hacker News's Resourcey page. Please upvote it if you like
it:
[http://www.resourcey.com/site_details/2/news.ycombinator.com...](http://www.resourcey.com/site_details/2/news.ycombinator.com/)

(If you don't know it, Resourcey is a small webapp I made to help keep track
of resources like this.)

------
RyanMcGreal
I'm commenting from inside the app. Nice, clean interface. My only suggestion
is better error messaging. I tried to post a comment before logging in, but
instead of warning me and/or providing the login form, it just looked as
though the comment had posted successfully.

~~~
gluegadget
My bad, as you see in Main activity you can't upvote when you're not logged
in. I had to do this for Comments activity too (disabling Comment menu, and
reply/upvote context menu).

------
derwiki
Just what I've been waiting for :) Is the scraping/parsing done on in the app
or on the remote end? (i.e., do I just have to count on HN being up for this
to keep working?)

~~~
gluegadget
It all happens in your phone, even Login. So your credentials are as safe as
your web browser.

------
camtarn
Nice app! :) I think I'll end up using it if only because the upvote buttons
on the HN website are so ridiculously fiddly to use on a mobile device...

One small quirk: I couldn't figure out how to upvote stories after logging in
- I could see the menu entry to upvote comments, but there was no menu entry
for upvoting on the main screen. Turned out I needed to manually refresh the
main story list before it turned up.

------
yock
Have you submitted this to the Marketplace for the poor, helpless AT&T
customers who cannot side-load apps?

\--signed Poor Helpless AT&T Customer

~~~
Tichy
He seems to be from Iran and therefore barred from the Marketplace (at least
from the Google Marketplace).

~~~
dabeeeenster
Any chance of getting the source into a public repo? I'd be happy to add it to
the market...

~~~
nuclear_eclipse
I'll also volunteer my currently-unused Android developer account, and my time
to build and upload new releases to the Market if it gets open sourced.

I've been meaning to get involved in some open source Android apps, but I've
not yet gotten much beyond developing apps for my own phone and needs. At
least this is something that I would dogfood every day. :)

------
JangoSteve
Cool app, this will be one of my new vices! I tried looking through the
sourcecode to do it myself, but I'm not incredibly familiar with Android app
structure or if maybe there's some convenient helper methods to do this in
Android apps.

I was just wondering if you could maybe add the following to the comment text
in the Comments view to render HTML elements like &#62; (which should be >)
and &#38; (which should be &). Also, maybe do this:

    
    
      comment = comment.replace(/\*(.+)\*/,"<i>$1</i>")
    

Also, I noticed the comments view doesn't space out paragraphs or render
preformatted text (inside the <pre> tags, which HN applies to lines that start
with two spaces).

------
buro9
My desktop is orange, could you give your icon a solid background colour so
that I can see it.

~~~
vyrotek
Same here :)

------
Indyan
Great work! I love the spartan interface. Btw, any chance of getting a
prefetching option?

------
chocolateboy
Allow this application to:

    
    
        * read phone state and identity
    

No thanks.

~~~
gluegadget
It doesn't require to read your phone state, I forgot add a minimum SDK
requirement, and Android adds that automatically for some compatibility
reason.

------
enderwiggin
Nice app, just one thing. If you press on an news item and it happens to take
some time to load (due to low connection speed) the dialog box saying
"Loading, Please wait..." is not cancelable (by pressing the Back button). It
might be useful to enable this in one of the next updates.

------
chewbranca
working pretty well for me. I've been using hn reader but I like that this
shows the scores. Makes it easier to filter.

Couple things. it appears to be using a non standard input form for comments
as none of the typical android auto complete is working. i also tried making a
few newlines buts it not showing up in here. also when youre on the comment
thread and you hit comment and then flip the screen, it reloads the entire
comment thread which is rather annoying on slow connections. otherwise working
pretty well. (i stopped manually fixing the things auto omplete normally
handles for emphasis. ie 'i' instead of 'I' and youre)

Update from laptop: newlines apparently work but don't show up in the comment
box. Auto complete and reloading the comment thread are still issues though.

------
ajju
On the HTC Evo running 2.2, the app loads ok but crashes when I click on an
individual story.

~~~
jdrock
Same for me. It also loads more slowly than going to the web page directly.

------
futuremint
Cool! I like that you have the source on github. It feels a little poky on my
Droid (OC'd to 800'hz) but works great! I also realize I could just fork on
github & make it faster, but I haven't much spare time at the moment.

------
vyrotek
I just noticed the karma widget. I laughed at first and then found myself
adding it. What have you done?!

I now have a screen on my phone with a handful of karma widgets. Its like a HN
leaderboard that will continuously taunt me.

------
Groxx
I _very_ much want to pronounce this "Handroid". Am I the only one?

------
edwtjo
Cool app!

Consider adding in settings support for the app. That way you could change
account@server. This would be useful for people reading other deployments of
the HN source.

Perhaps I'll just do it myself ;)

------
NickPollard
Just gave it a go, very clean, simple and elegant. Just what I needed.

Thank you very much for this. Do you have a donations page? I'd gladly give a
couple of dollars if this works out.

~~~
gluegadget
Thanks!

I really appreciate it, but I can't accept donations for the exact reason I
can't put the application in android Market.

------
Raphael
Ooh, can we have a custom color? You can take it from the HN "topcolor"
setting or just a setting in the options.

Also, it'd be nice if the karma widget opened the app.

------
grandalf
On a related note, what's the best HN app for iPhone?

~~~
ronnier
Try my web app, <http://ihackernews.com>

If you want a native iPhone app, Michael Grinich has one:
<http://michaelgrinich.com/hackernews>

~~~
grandalf
awesome web app!

------
sjs382
Been waiting for this! :) (sent from my phone)

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zakame
Nice app!!! Keep up the good work! Would love to have custom colors though so
looks like the original HN Reader ...

------
khingebjerg
I can't open the "Coming Home to Vim" link, from the app. It just crashes. I
have it setup to open the comments.

------
vyrotek
Hello from the app! Works great, thanks!

~~~
etix
Works great here too, thanks!

------
zvikara
Good job!

Opening the menu crashes the app on my Samsung i7500 / Android 1.6

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psyklic
This app is amazing! Will it support HN's OpenID login?

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nrbafna
I still like ihackernews.com on my android.

------
decavolt
I already have a client. It's called Browser and has this great ability to
open other pages on the interwebs.

