

Show HN: Hacker News Client for Windows Phone 8.1 - Livven
https://www.windowsphone.com/s?appid=5e5a14a9-d08b-45ee-a5c2-b44713868af7

======
Livven
I released this app a couple weeks ago, but the initial submission [1] did not
get any traction here so I thought I'd resubmit it. Hope that's okay.

All the various sections and categories on HN are supported – the front page,
new, show, shownew, ask, best, active, jobs. There's an integrated browser
with mobilizer support, and you can instantly switch between the browser and
comments with a simple swipe. Comment threads are color-coded and collapsible.

This is my first non-trivial project that I actually finished and released, so
I'd appreciate any feedback.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8663913](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8663913)

~~~
ygra
I like it so far, for the most part. Especially that you can quickly switch
between the article and the comments, which in normal browsers I'd even a
hassle on the desktop. If we some day get the ability to content as well ...
:)

Not to much of a fan of the colored bars for nested comments, shades of the
same color (we already have an accent color on WP) might be nicer. Might also
be nicer to people who are colorblind.

The address/toolbar below the article feels more like Android than WP. On WP
you usually get an explanation of icons in the toolbar when stopping up
because their captions are right underneath the low end of the screen. Took me
a while to figure out what the icons meant which IMHO isn't that great UX.
Also a reason why I like the toolbar design on WP, because it's compact and
supports labels if the user needs them. Not sure how to incorporate the usual
toolbar design into the current workings of the app, though.

When tapping the '...' button the animation of the ellipsis feels like it
rotates around the wrong pivot. It doesn't do so when swiping to the left.
Maybe that's because the scrolling left animation of the bar is eased when
tapping the button and the rotation animation is not. Maybe its even easier to
bind the rotation angle to the current horizontal shift of the bar (coming
from WPF here, so maybe it doesn't make sense).

Clearing the browser before loading a new article would be nice. Loading takes
a while and tapping on a headline just to see the old content can be a bit
strange.

~~~
Livven
Thanks, that's some very interesting and useful feedback!

1\. I assume "the ability to content" means voting/commenting? ;)

2\. The advantage of those colored bars is that they are very easy to visually
parse, while also requiring very little indentation. In fact, it would take 40
levels of comment nesting before half the screen width of a regular size (non-
phablet) device is used up. However, I see your point, and will probably add
an alternate comment threading style later on.

3\. The address bar for the browser is actually very similar to the standard
WP browser, which also doesn't have the usual icon labels. Back, forward,
refresh, stop, more, and share should be self-explanatory, so I guess you were
having issues with the mobilize and open-in-IE icons? I might change those out
for the reading mode icon that IE uses [1], and the IE icon, respectively,
which should hopefully make them more obvious. The reason I did not use them
in the first place is because I have not been able to find vector/font
versions of those icons. Also, I agree with you on the WP app bar, it's really
well designed, however since it's an OS component it can't really be
customized which is why I'm not using it.

4\. The rotation angle is already bound to the horizontal scroll offset. As
for the rotation direction, I tried both ways and this one felt better to me.
I'm not sure why scrolling the bar in one direction should cause the rotation
to feel wrong to you though, maybe try scrolling the bar by dragging instead
of using the button and see if it still feels weird?

5\. That's a very good point that I never thought of. Fixed, and should be
available along with some other minor design changes next week.

BTW, would you be interested in beta testing a Reddit client I'm currently
working on? Your feedback has been the best I've gotten so far, much
appreciated :)

[1] [http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2014/03/04/introducing-
re...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2014/03/04/introducing-reading-view-
in-ie-11.aspx)

~~~
ygra
1\. Yes, I meant comment; was writing that on the phone ;)

2\. In my suggestion I thought about using the same indentation style (which
is nice and space-saving, indeed), but just using different opacities of the
accent colour instead of individual colours for each indentation level. But
again, that's probably personal preference and not a hard rule :)

3\. The share icon is common enough by now that I know it, but I had to tap
the last one (open in browser) to know what it does. Hopefully the IE icon may
be used in that context. Perhaps labels for the buttons might still be added,
in the usual fashion:
[http://hypftier.de/temp/wp_ss_20150103_0002.jpg](http://hypftier.de/temp/wp_ss_20150103_0002.jpg)
– they'd be hidden below the screen's bottom edge by default; dragging up a
bit would reveal them as usual. Also your dragging gesture behaves the same as
elsewhere, which means that dragging up just a bit to reveal the labels would
drop the bar to the bottom again after letting go.

However, looking at IE now, it doesn't do that for the single icon on the app
bar that you can choose, but that might be because you can choose it and
therefore know its purpose. Back, Forward and Refresh indeed need no labels.

4\. I think I found out why it looks off. The pressing and releasing animation
where the icon drops a bit down and bounces up again plays at the same time,
which means the button comes up again during the scrolling animation, making
the rotation look wiggly. But right now my tired eyes fail to discern any
difference. Disregard this, then ;)

5\. I'd be glad to, although I'm not that much of a heavy reddit user. HN is
bad enough in terms of a time sink :D

6\. Another minor thing: Up until now I didn't even see that there's a screen
to the left of the headline list. And now I noticed that you get there by
pressing the ⇄ button. I'm not sure, as I've never designed a UI like that,
but it seems to me the more-or-less default idiom for invoking such a thing is
a hamburger menu button on the top left of the app
([http://hypftier.de/temp/wp_ss_20150103_0003.png](http://hypftier.de/temp/wp_ss_20150103_0003.png))
or using the app's icon in the top left for the same purpose. But that's more
an Androidism, I think. The canonical way on WP would probably be a Pivot
control, but that'd kill the swiping for going back to the browser. Not sure
right now. Interaction feels slick and is nice with Hacky News, it's just not
really native to WP in some places. The lack of the Pivot control also means
that you have to swipe back to the start screen from the browser on the
app/address bar, even if there is no browser history to go back to.

7\. A few typos: »Water you doing here ?« There should be no space before
punctuation (except in French where people do that ;)). Settings: »Always use
a colored (orange) til« should be »tile«. Credits: »open source libraries«
should be »open-source«.

8\. My usual view on a help section for mobile apps is that if you need it,
you should probably redesign your UX, but there are only so many things that
can be made discoverable, admittedly. Also I may have an interest in UX, but
am not an expert ;)

Again, it's a slick and well-designed app, and thank you for making it. Just
because there are 8 points above doesn't mean I don't like it ;)

~~~
Livven
2\. The problem is that different opacities of the same color aren't as easily
distinguishable. Nonetheless I tried some different variants here
[http://imgur.com/a/inGAD](http://imgur.com/a/inGAD). (1) simply replaces the
different colors with different opacities and leaves everything else the same,
I think it looks too random. (2) does not fade out the additional bars to the
left, slightly more differentiated but too cluttered. (3) keeps all the
additional bars at the same opacity, looks best IMO. What do you think?

3\. The reading mode button in IE does not have a label either, so that only
leaves the open-in-IE button. Hopefully with the IE icon that one should be
obvious as well.

4\. Oh yeah the tilt effect, it doesn't really make much sense for those
buttons beneath the browser anyway so I removed it there.

5\. If you don't mind, I'll email you using the address in your profile once
the beta is out. Might take a few more weeks.

6\. I was worried about that screen not being very discoverable. The
navigation is indeed a bit Android-like, so I tried to compromise by using
another icon that makes sense (switch) instead of the hamburger icon. However
it seems many people don't realize what the switch button does, and miss out
on the settings menu because of it. I'll probably have to replace the app icon
with the hamburger icon. Also, you can always use the back button to go back,
is that not obvious (honest question, even if it sounds weird)?

7\. (1) "Water you doing" is just a silly pun, I'm surprised you pointed out
the extraneous space but ignored the "water" part :p (2) That is a
margin/spacing issue, did you increase the system font size? The settings
screen is kind of thrown together with very little customization, the toggle
switch does not wrap its label by default but still there should usually be
enough space for the full text. (3) Thanks, the hyphen seems to be more
appropriate when it's used as an adjective so I added it.

8\. Generally agree, but only if it's absolutely required to understand how to
use the app. That's not the case here.

And finally, I really appreciate your feedback, it's useful to me whether you
like the app or not :)

------
grotos
Initial feedback:

* it would be great to be able to submit comment,

* I use "collapse thread" quite often so it would be beneficial to do it in one tap.

Overall good design and better than other, probably abandoned clients for WP8.
Keep up the good work!

~~~
Livven
Thanks for your feedback!

Voting and commenting is definitely planned, however I'm waiting on the API to
add support for authentication first. The app actually does not use the API
since it's somewhat lacking right now [1] so it scrapes the markup instead,
but I'm not quite comfortable with implementing login/voting/commenting by
scraping.

You can collapse comments by tapping anywhere outside the text area, i.e. on
the author/time header or on the margins to the left and right. I'm sorry
that's not obvious, I'll probably add a message explaining it in the next
update.

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8423025](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8423025)

------
Artemis2
Great app! I've been using it for a few weeks and I fell in love with it. Keep
up the good work!

