Show HN: I made Hazumi, a modern HN reader for iOS

[jrhey]

https://apps.apple.com/ie/app/hazumi/id1670237209

Hello HN,

I'm thrilled to announce the launch of my first app, Hazumi, a Hacker News reader, available for free on iOS!

I’ve been lurking on HN for around 2 years while working on this project seeing people post amazing HN reader apps of their own. I’ve always figured Hazumi wasn’t good enough yet to post here but if I wait around until I’m ready, I’ll probably never share so here goes…

Hazumi is a modern Hacker News app for your pocket with some intentional limitations.

Stories are displayed on a simple colourful card, with images, that condenses all the information you need at a glance. Out of the box you get accessibility features for system settings like light/dark mode and text size. Others are controlled in app for opening stories in a Web View vs externally via Safari, defaulting to Reader Mode and reducing animation bounciness.

You can browse top, new and best sections, limited to 30 stories each, which refresh every hour on the server. I’m not a fan of infinite scrolling or spending a lot of time reading news. I just want to get in and get out while keeping up on the latest.

Other notable features: - Basic search - Widgets for your Home and Lock Screen - Apple Watch app - Warns you of non-HTTPS links

There are a few “PRO” features that require a subscription ($/€1.99 monthly): - AI summaries of comments on stories that have at least 30 root level comments - In app newsletter (yesterday’s top 10 stories) - Bookmarking with iCloud support - Themes (change the colour of the cards) - Supporting indie developers and keeping the lights on for Hazumi

Working on: - Better comments/tappable links - Enhancing search - More themes

Being the first version, it's very early days for Hazumi and there are bugs that I’m working on fixing. I'm eager to improve it and shape its future based on your input. I welcome any feedback you may have, whether it's about existing features or ideas for new ones. Your thoughts will be instrumental in shaping Hazumi, making it an even more useful tool for tech news enthusiasts.

Please give it a try and let me know your thoughts.

P.S. Shout out to MB and MC for your awesome feedback during the TestFlight beta!

[rojeee]

This looks great and I would love to try it but I have an iPhone 7 plus so can't install the required version of iOS - need to upgrade!

I currently use Octal but would switch and pay the subscription for an app that:

1) Highlights or lowlights comments I've already read. I think this is quite hard to do well though.

2) Allows me to hide stories I'm not interested in with a swipe.

3) Adds read later functionality - maybe an option available in the story screen. Currently, I favourite things I want to read and then unfavourite when I've finished but I realise that's probably not what the feature was intended for!

Bonus points for an offline mode! (as someone else mentioned)

[jrhey → rojeee]

Sorry about the minimum iOS version! I rely on various APIs that iOS 16 brought into SwiftUI.

The point you raised about "read later" started spinning some wheels in my mind. I really like that idea. Right now I have bookmarks, but that would only be the same workflow as you have with favourites. I'm now thinking up ways to make that "I'm finished reading this" either dynamic and/or manually initiated.

I'd love to take the "hide stories I'm not interested in" approach and pair it with the flip side, "send me a push notification whenever a story is posted that mentions <keyword>".

I've tinkered with automatic categorisation (with mixed success) before using OpenAI, which may help users filter out things that are deemed "sensational" or "political".

Thank you for this feedback. It really helps!

[danpalmer]

Looks lovely, and the animations are beautiful.

If you’re looking for feature requests… long shot I know…. I’ve always wanted an HN app that has better offline support. I do most of my HN reading on the London Underground where there’s little phone signal and only wifi at stations.

The sort of things I’d love to see are: archiving the top stories and comments overnight so that no internet is required to view, loading both comments and stories at the same time, and not unloading one (requiring a re-request) when switching between them, or anything else that minimises the amount of networking required.

Otherwise, maybe more actionable feedback, the two taps to get into a story/comments feels unnecessary. As much as the animation is stunning, it feels like it’s slower to use than necessary.

[jrhey → danpalmer]

Thank you for checking our Hazumi!

> I’ve always wanted an HN app that has better offline support

That's a great feature request. I'll brainstorm some ways achieve this without affecting battery life too much. Maybe it could even be a toggle in settings for those who want pre-cached content. Like how YouTube or Podcasts apps do it.

> the two taps to get into a story/comments feels unnecessary

I'll look into this too, I have a feeling now most of HN will agree here.

Thank you again for the feedback, much appreciated!

[camillomiller]

Nice! One thing: could you consider an option that avoids image previews? One thing I like about hacker news is that what I decide to explore is based solely on the entry’s headline. Also, the app pulls pictures that are sometimes quite useless. E.g. it’s pretty annoying to se the arxiv logo repeated multiple times within a timeline.

[jrhey → camillomiller]

Thanks for checking it out! So much amazing feedback here this morning.

> could you consider an option that avoids image previews?

Yes, definitely. This would also serve users well when they want to save on network requests/battery. Consider this added to the next build.

> arxiv logo

Ahh classic, I'm so familiar with this logo having seen it so many times during development. It just never clicked until you said it to hide image previews.

Thank you again for the feedback!

[jrhey → camillomiller]

Followup: I've just submitted this "Hide image previews in Settings" build to App Store review

[tommasoamici]

Your app looks promising, I quite like the look and feel.

There are some low hanging UX improvements you could work on next: tapping on a story in the feed shows options to go to the comments or to the article, and I wish this could be done with a single tap.

Similarly, when reading comment threads it’s a bit annoying having to open replies one by one. For me, the best threaded discussion reader on iOS is Apollo which shows quite a few replies and goes more than 6 levels deep with indentation without having to tap anywhere.

I can already tell you that the default font size is going to be divisive, especially for readers of HN ;)

I’ll keep this app around and check the change logs to see if it could replace Octal, which I’m using now

[jrhey → tommasoamici]

Thank you, I'm really glad you find the UI appealing!

> the best threaded discussion reader on iOS is Apollo

Nested comment design have been a weakness of mine and it certainly shows in Hazumi. I want to revamp comments so badly, showing a batch of nested comments in one tap or by default does sound better. A general theme I've been hearing here is "less taps to get to the content the better". 100% noted!

> the default font size is going to be divisive

I ended up using the default `body` size from SwiftUI but if you mean it would be more appealing if smaller, then I could add a text sizing slider to the settings.

Thank you again for trying out Hazumi and giving your feedback!

[insomniacity]

The AI summary is hard for me to visualise/validate. How about exposing it free for the top story of the day?

[jrhey → insomniacity]

That's a good point, I just realized I didn't add a screenshot of that feature to the App Store page :homer_doh:

I do have a free trial for PRO for 1 week if you wanted to give it a try but here's a screenshot I posted to Twitter to help visualize it:

https://twitter.com/HazumiApp/status/1660636585702948865?s=2...

[kushie]

nice app ill try this for a bit! could links found in comments be clickable?

[jrhey → kushie]

100%, I personally can't wait to add this feature in addition to better formatting and layout of comments.