

Meet news:yc, the open source Hacker News client for your iPhone. - news-yc
http://newsyc.me/??

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metachris
Thanks for releasing it as free software. <https://github.com/newsyc/newsyc>

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unwantedLetters
On the page it says it'll probably be $4.99. So it is open source, but it may
not be free.

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mpakes
"Free" as in speech, not as in beer.

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unwantedLetters
I stand corrected.

For the uninitiated (as myself): "“Free software” does not mean
“noncommercial.” A free program must be available for commercial use,
commercial development, and commercial distribution. Commercial development of
free software is no longer unusual; such free commercial software is very
important. You may have paid money to get copies of free software, or you may
have obtained copies at no charge. But regardless of how you got your copies,
you always have the freedom to copy and change the software, even to sell
copies. "

From <http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html>

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Jd
As far as I can tell, this gives anyone the freedom to purchase then give away
the software. Meaning that there is no moral, ethical, or legal barrier for
the original developer to charge $5 to the first purchaser and for the first
purchaser to then give out free copies to everyone else.

Perhaps I also need to be initiated to comprehend this...

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fluidcruft
You are correct :)

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Joshim5
Upvoted for multiple reasons: 1) The app itself looks pretty good. 2) Open-
source 3) You're a high school student too. (What year?)

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news-yc
Sophomore, so I'm 15 right now.

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aaronbrethorst
I ran across this earlier today and added a small feature to it[1]. The author
is very receptive to pull requests, so I highly recommend forking away!

If you're interested in contributing and stumped for things to add or fix,
check out the included TODO file.

[1]
[https://github.com/newsyc/newsyc/commit/01bc7bf30c10a2abd8f0...](https://github.com/newsyc/newsyc/commit/01bc7bf30c10a2abd8f0ff7d481743b001eb6f01)

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lloeki
With all the effort going into that app and the other web wrappers mentioned
around here, I may be missing something but why is there no media query in HN
CSS to adapt itself to iPhone, iPad _and_ other (WebKit-based at least) mobile
devices. I weight it to about ten lines of CSS at most, setting font scale,
body width and vote up image size. I am on the verge of creating a bookmarklet
to load such additional CSS and sync it to my devices but couldn't resort to
that yet because of it being a _total hack_ that I'd need to call on _each HN
page load_.

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shii
Ever since Garry joined YC, I assumed (and suggested) this as one of the top
things they get on making...just a simple UA detection for mobiles and more
usable interface in CSS as you mention.

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kloncks
Here's a question. Love the app, but can I login to my account? I don't have a
normal YC-account, but rather one through Open-ID with my Google Id.

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news-yc
That's a good question, actually. I've never used OpenID so I have no idea
what's involved in that, but I'll make a (mental?) note to look into seeing if
it works (and probably fixing it) soon.

~~~
extension
The simplest way to do it is to open a browser view to the login page, then
let the user do whatever and just watch the cookie store for the appropriate
key. As soon as it shows up, close the browser and use that key in the app.
This works for all the login methods.

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chrishenn
Looks awesome, I'll happily buy it for $5 once it hits the store.

It's also nice that it's open source. Contributing to an actual iOS app could
be a nice way to get a taste of iOS development without having to start a
whole project from scratch (if you have no previous experience.)

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itsnotvalid
Try wordpress for iPhone (<http://ios.wordpress.org/development/>) which has
been developed for a long time. However I agree that it's easier to pick a
project with less code in it to learn.

Another way is by writing an app.

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davidcann
Nice work, this is the new best HN iPhone client.

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nathanwdavis
I've been pretty happy with the Hacker News app by Michael Grinich, but this
looks promising and competition is a wonderful thing.

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madh
I just bought that app after using <http://www.icombinator.net> for a long
time. I like the app but wish it did things a little differently--default to
mobilized articles, go beyond the top 30 articles, load comments more quickly
--so it's great to have something to customize and hack on. Thanks!

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svdr
There is also <http://ihackernews.com>.

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yesimahuman
I moved from icombinator to ihackernews since ihackernews acts more like a
normal web app (icombinator locks the page as it reloads and makes it hard to
come back to articles). However, it has a hard time grabbing comments (most
don't work right), so it's frustrating to use.

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ronnier
What happens is my IP gets blocked by YC. So until the traffic dies down or I
change my IP address, it errors out while getting the comments (YC serves me a
blank page).

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news-yc
That issue is actually why I went with a distributed approach to news:yc.
Yeah, it's a pain: no remote updates (App Store restrictions) and a lengthy
review process for each change needed (do you know about how often the markup
changes, btw?), but I don't have to deal with any caching, rate limiting, or
anything else this way.

(Of course, I don't even think you _can_ do anything like that on the web
(even JavaScript, cross-domain issues), so your approach is probably required
there.)

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extension
You could probably get away with remotely updating some sort of declarative
grammar/schema, as long as it doesn't allow arbitrary code execution.

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gmac
If it isn't too slow, you could do the parsing with some remotely-updatable
JavaScript, using UIWebView's stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString:.

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zefhous
This is great, thank you!

Took me a while to figure out how to get signed in with instapaper... Turns
out it's in the Settings app. I wish Apple provided an API to link from an app
to its settings page, and back to the app from the settings.

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ghiculescu
+1 to this, I spent ages looking around the app trying to find a settings
icon, with no luck. I think an Instapaper login would work much better in the
More section of the app, than in the global settings app (especially if
there's nothing else there).

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reustle
No Android love?

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news-yc
No Android love, basically, because I don't use Android and this was written
(as is often suggested) so scratch a personal itch: Hacker News wasn't fun to
browse on my iPhone. Perhaps Google will give out Android devices at I/O and
I'll be able to work on a port then.

HP/Palm did send me a Pre 2 development device, though, so I may port it over
there if and when I start using webOS for my primary phone.

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_frog
Wait, are you chpwn by any chance? Because you quite extensively use the
slide-behind header trick from his last post on <http://chpwn.com/blog/>

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Joshim5
That is correct.

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tobiasbischoff
Writing this comment with the app from my phone, thanks alot.

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EGreg
This is cool. Oh, you're a high school student? Awesome.

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moeseth
Chpwn, u have gained more respect from me with this app.

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nabaraj
where is the android version??

