
Show HN: I made a privacy-first, minimalistic browser for Hacker News - bithavoc
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/top-now/id1486916333?ls=1
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bithavoc
Author here. I used to Safari on iPhone to browse HN but I never felt
comfortable mixing a trusted browsing session such as the HN front page and
discussion with externally linked articles in the stories, so I built a simple
browser to ensure that every article opens in a temporary browsing session
that is fast, secure, and stable. everything else works as expected including
your regular sign-in, upvote, flagging comments and other sessions of the
hacker news web experience

The backend is a very simple Go service with two endpoints and a Postgres
database that keep tracks of all the broadcasted stories. The backend directly
scraps the front page of HN because the official Firebase API reports
different top stories than the front page. The app is pure Swift+UIKit with a
Combination of tricks around WKWebView navigation, WKWebView gestures and
Navigation Controller to create a consistent browsing zone for your HN front
page and temporary browsing zones for the articles. The app tracks analytics
anonymously without any third-party SDK.

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mtmail
Awesome. Can you add a link to [https://github.com/cheeaun/awesome-hacker-
news/](https://github.com/cheeaun/awesome-hacker-news/) ?

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yohannparis
I was wondering if your app improves the touch area on the clickable element?
Reaching the small arrows and collapse is a bit of hit and miss on safari.

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bithavoc
Cool suggestion. This and adding support for Dark mode is on my list of
improvements for future versions. In this version the layout of the front-page
remains the same including the size of the clickable elements such as links to
comments, article domain and op links. The reason I didn't change is because I
tried other HN client apps in the AppStore that use different home page
layouts and I always go back to Safari because I'm so used to click the small
elements. It's certainly something that can be improved though, maybe the
default layout is like Safari's but with an option to have the enhanced layout
with bigger elements.

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yohannparis
I was thinking of just adding pseudo-elements on top of the existing links to
make their clickable area bigger and not touching the design of the website
per se. [https://webdesigntips.blog/web-design/css-
tricks/enhancing-t...](https://webdesigntips.blog/web-design/css-
tricks/enhancing-the-clickable-area-size/)

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bithavoc
Yeah I can totally do that. Feel free to send me an email if you would like to
be the first to try it via Testflight.

