
Show HN: Akepa – Our HN App - allending
https://www.snappymob.com/blog/2015-05-14-akepa-has-landed/
======
leesalminen
Found a bug in the app that allowed me to get the pro version without paying.
Email is in my profile if you want to chat. Would prefer to not make it public
info :)

------
OhHeyItsE
[http://hackerwebapp.com/](http://hackerwebapp.com/)

~~~
nwienert
Built one with reapp at: [http://hn.reapp.io/](http://hn.reapp.io/)

------
minimaxir
Since the official API
([https://github.com/HackerNews/API](https://github.com/HackerNews/API)) does
not support authentication, how are you collecting and storing auth
credentials for login/posting?

~~~
allending
We don't store credentials within the app. When you login, we just keep the
(long lived) auth cookie provided by HN if login succeeded and reuse it in the
future when posting.

------
weinzierl
It's great to see another app for HN that allows posting.

I used to use Hacker News (YC) by Dharmesh Patel and was very happy with it
but it is read only. I tried news:yc which claims to support posting but that
never worked. I submitted a bug report but never heard back.

I use MiniHack by Cai GuangShao for reading, voting and posting now. It works
really well and I'm very happy with it. A while ago I reported a small bug and
it was fixed immediately.

What can I do with Akepa that I can't do with MiniHack? Why should I switch?

~~~
whiteisblack
There is a cool little stuff when you login into hn, it has 1password support.

------
eps
Excellent, excellent. Does it phone home?

That is, does it connect strictly to the HN and only websites explicitly
opened by the user? Or does it talk to something else on the Internet behind
user's back?

~~~
andrewksl
We contact our servers only to verify receipts when you buy Pro (had some
issues with that earlier :$). We also use analytics for crash reports.

Everything else is either direct to
[https://news.ycombinator.com](https://news.ycombinator.com) or
[https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com](https://hacker-news.firebaseio.com) (the
official API). And, of course, sites explicitly opened by the user.

Edit: We also use the readability API for reading mode.
[https://www.readability.com/](https://www.readability.com/)

------
jordanlev
Love it, nice work!

Feature request: be able to collapse comment threads (on the AlienBlue reddit
app it's swipe left to collapse, swipe right to re-expand, but any mechanism
would be greatly appreciated).

Another very minor (and AlienBlue-inspired) request: since you can swipe left
from a comment page to go back to the article, it would make sense to be able
to swipe right to navigate from the article over to the comment thread.

Thanks for putting this fantastic app out there, best of luck!

~~~
ohitsdom
I would absolutely pay for collapsible comment threads. I hate comment systems
that don't allow it, and it's one of the reasons I love Disqus. While we're
requesting features, can HN add this to the site?

~~~
ibejoeb
You can use HNES
([https://github.com/etcet/HNES](https://github.com/etcet/HNES)) for Chrome to
get collapsible comments. You can also use my fork
([https://github.com/ibejoeb/HNES](https://github.com/ibejoeb/HNES)) to try
some enhancements to the collapsible comments, which does persistent collapses
and new comment indicators on the parent thread.

------
ljk
looks like the icon is morse code for "akepa"

~~~
hnyc
Indeed. And apparently

    
    
      ʻAkepa is a Hawaiian term meaning "agile"
    

According to Wikipedia.

------
alexyoung
I like the app: the UI is amazing! I hope to see some technical posts about
Swift on the Snappymob blog.

I have a small suggestion. I think the homepage copy would work better if you
edited some of the clichés: "Make the app your own" and "Let Your Voice Be
Heard" could be improved, for example.

------
ctekin
For those of you not on iOS 8 like me, here's another nice client :
[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hacker-news-
yc/id713733435?m...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hacker-news-
yc/id713733435?mt=8)

------
hit8run
It would be sufficient if HN finally added responsive CSS. Grant me access and
I do it for you.

------
toomuchtodo
Just attempted to go Pro ($5? Of course! Quality work should be rewarded). As
soon as the purchase was complete, the app said it couldn't verify the
purchase and to try again at a later time.

~~~
taylorling
Hey,

Thanks for the report! We are going for a quick fix now, something on the
validation server :P

Thanks for the support!

~~~
toomuchtodo
Thank you!

------
huangc10
Looks really clean, beautiful, well thought out and designed. Keep up the good
work!

------
spiffyman
Looks great. One thing I loved about HackerNode was the fact that I could send
an article to Chrome. (Maybe I'm blind, but I can't figure out how to add
Chrome to the iOS 8 activities sheet.) The in-app browser is nice, but this is
an important feature for history-diving purposes. I'm sure lots of your target
market don't use Safari on the desktop. Any plans to support it?

~~~
taylorling
Nah, you are not blind, I can't figure that out either. we will put the
suggested feature (share to chrome) in the list, if it's not too tricky,
likely it will be there in the next version since it's something affecting the
HN consumption experience :)

~~~
stephenr
Isn't this explicitly a chrome issue? My understanding is that apps need to
"advertise" themselves to appear in a share sheet, so they appear as an option
for the user?

------
iambot
Just paid for pro, and up voting/ commenting from inside. I don't even care if
I'm giving you my authentication creds. So gud!

------
technologia
I like the work, but whats up with the taste analogies in your app's
description (i.e. Delicious UI)?

------
jfg
Just downloaded, seems really polished and looks beautiful.

I'm currently a user of [http://hn.premii.com](http://hn.premii.com), I'd make
the switch to your app if you can get the 'yesterday's best' page, and an
option to have readability mode on by default.

Very promising though, out of interest how long have you spent on the project?

~~~
zolokar
Wow, that's a great looking webapp.

~~~
captn3m0
Its not just on web, it is available on both iOS and Android and works quite
well on all 3 platforms.

------
raymondgh
Nice app. Personally, I am pretty happy with yohackernews for mobile. One
thing I'd like to know more about though is Akepa's icon / logo. It's very
cool. I would love to read about your design process & ideation.

~~~
taylorling
Thanks for your love towards the Akepa logo ;)

I will see if I can do some write ups on the design process for the app, which
can be interesting (or boring) I think.

But hey, thanks again!

------
dirtybirdnj
Looks beautiful, disappointed it's iOS focused and there's no Android version.

Either way, good job.

------
Matt3o12_
This app is really nice and well designed but I think I'll stick with "Hacker
News (YC)" by Dharmesh Patel. Here is why:

\- Your font looks really cool but I can't read it for a long period of time.
Could you add an option to adjust the font size (I know I can change that in
the iOS settings but when I do that, all the text is bigger and this distracts
me. I only need big text for long reading sessions). Hacker News offers that
in the settings.

\- I really would like to test out your pro themes, but I don't want to pay
the full price for testing it. How about you let us use all these themes for
the top story (i.e. only for one story). If I like the themes, I'll buy pro
because I want to have it for all stories. This is better then a preview text.

\- I really like Hacker News' "Content read" (I don't know how to call it).
Instead of opening the full HTML page, it only shows me the content of the
page – without any distracting CSS fonts, ads, or banners that block the
content. It is extremely helpful for pages that are not optimized for mobile
and for pages that need 2 clicks to get to the content (for example github
requires me to click "View all of README" although all I wanna do is read the
readme. The HackerNews app takes care of that for me. It also loads the
content when I'm in the underground train or in school incredible fast. I only
have edge internet there and a full HTML page with all assets takes over a
minute to load.

~~~
andrewksl
Hi there. We're going to take note of the first two points and see what we can
do about it.

As for the third, have you tried reading mode? It's the armchair icon to the
URL in the browser.

~~~
Matt3o12_
Hey, thanks!

As of the reading mode (that was the word I was looking for), Yes, I have
heard about it. I use it when I load a webpage in Safari. Still, it is only
available when the page finished loading. When I'm riding the train I have
edge internet + heigh latency and package loss, loading a JS library (that
almost every webpage has), is close to impossible. It takes ages and almost
always times out. Since most of the time the <script> tags are in the header,
the content won't be visible until the scripts are there. Maybe there is a
library that does the job.

~~~
andrewksl
You should be able to enter reading mode before the page finishes (or even
starts, for that matter) loading.

We use the readability
([https://www.readability.com/](https://www.readability.com/)) API, which does
all scraping/parsing server-side.

~~~
Matt3o12_
Sorry, I didn't read the parent comment thoroughly enough. I though you meant
the reading mode in safari.

Then, I suppose my third point is invalid :) Thank you very much :)

------
ebabchick
I would pay for this if it came with a browser plugin that synced my already-
viewed links between devices

------
DAddYE
Finally!!!! Thanks for this!!! Just downloaded and purchased the pro!

------
fullstackdave
Sold. iOS dev myself, and I love the interactions. Commenting with the app
now.

First feature request: enable readability by default in settings.

Cheers!

~~~
fullstackdave
Also, weird side note: when enabling readability on this post, you get an
error.

------
mrmondo
Question: how do you get to a list of your comments / submissions?

~~~
taylorling
Not yet in our 1.0 (which is our MVP), but I can assure you it is in the
pipeline :)

------
allending
Maker here. Just a fun note. One of the hardest parts about making the app was
getting enough karma so we could test downvoting.

~~~
ohitsdom
What is that karma threshold? The site guidelines seem intentionally vague on
this.

~~~
allending
500 \o/

~~~
ohitsdom
Wow. Pretty funny imagining a dev team on HN all day, writing insightful
comments all in the name of testing.

~~~
krapp
I can personally guarantee you that comments don't have to be 'insightful' to
get karma.

~~~
samstave
[5 - Funny]

------
lobster_johnson
Congrats, seems to work pretty well. I can tell you why I won't be switching
away from Minihack [1], though.

First, apparently there is no collapsing support. Secondly, and more
importantly, that default font. Not a fan. It's super thin, tiny, and you
can't adjust the text size. Apparently there are "pro" themes, but you force
the user to buy without giving a preview of what you'll be getting. Thirdly,
no night mode; Minihack's is really pleasant.

[1] [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/minihack-for-hacker-
news/id6...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/minihack-for-hacker-
news/id631108846?mt=8)

~~~
alexggordon
To be honest, I didn't know you could collapse comments. Since there's not a
way to "discover" it in the UI, I figured that it didn't exist. While I'm not
sure of the implementation, I think it would be a benefit to the end users to
show off that feature better in the UI.

~~~
lobster_johnson
To be fair, swiping is fairly common in iOS apps. Mail and Reeder come to
mind. When I try out a new app I usually test to see if UI elements support
gestures like these.

Showing some kind of button defeats the utility somewhat, and I think a help
pane explaining available gestures would be a better solution. You could stick
it in the preferences view.

~~~
alexggordon
I agree with you that we've trained users to expect UITableView Cells to be
swipeable, yet I'd argue that the comments on MiniHack don't fit into a
"standard" UI for cells (they don't look like a table view cell from Mail and
Reeder, especially since a cell can take up more than a screen of height).

As such, I wouldn't expect my users to know to swipe them. I do agree that a
help pane would do the trick, but personally I would probably lean towards an
AlienBlue type of indication that the "cell" is actionable (the triangle
showing Compressed or Uncompressed, and a row of icons that appears when you
tap the cell, instead of the popup from the bottom).

That said, a JazzHands[0] type tutorial would serve perfectly fine too!

[0] [https://github.com/IFTTT/JazzHands](https://github.com/IFTTT/JazzHands)

------
mrmondo
This is really beautiful - you should be proud of your work!

Feature request: please let me make the font smaller (and perhaps change the
typeface?).

------
guilamu
Android?

~~~
danmaz74
They lost us...

~~~
taylorling
Trust me (and us), we wanted to make the best HN reading experience on Android
devices as well, but we are totally short of hands, therefore iOS for now.

~~~
harel
I trust you, but the guy upstairs is right. You did kinda lose us.... There's
a lot of "us".

------
verelo
I have used HackerNode for the longest time. It has some weird UI elements but
for some reason I like the way it uses the screen space, all the other seem to
involve a lot of scrolling (more than I personally want)

Sadly recently HackerNode's comment section broke and none of the ASK HN type
posts render any more. So I guess what I'm saying is, I'll give it a go :-)

~~~
taylorling
Definitely give it a try and let us know what you think :)

