I work at Forbes, so it was cool to see our article page in the screenshot. However I noticed the app appears to be blocking Forbes ads and overlaying its own.
I'm perhaps biased in this case, but I would consider that to be bad form.
As the maker of the app, I can assure you that the app is not doing any such thing.
It is just loading the page in a simple iOS webview.The social icons that you see come out when you press the button in the centre and go back in when you press it again.
I have a few of these HN clients, but never use them, because I love chronological front page. If you could add a chronological ordering of the front page (like http://hckrnews.com does), I'd buy your app in an instant.
And a very important note: Your app is universal, so don't use TWO separate icons for advertising it - It's confusing, and I thought I have to pay twice for it (one for my iPhone and one for my iPad).
Just bought this and I'm not seeing any way to leave a comment. Am I missing something? The discussions in the comments are the most important part of Hacker News IMO.
Decided to spend the last few hours making my own :-)
Now to decide if I should clean it up and go ahead and put it on the store. Does everything I need though and I solved my boredom problem this afternoon so it was a good day.
Happily purchased! I love what you did with the icon; it looks great.
I'm using it on the ipad now; it's a great UI, I like how you made and used a cascading UI for it. My only suggestion would be to make the news list not as cramped. But, then again, that maintains some style from the current web version :)
This is the best HN iPad app for sure - nice work! I like the news:yc iPhone app although though, so not sure I'll switch. One thing I'd like in a HN app is a "night mode", the reddit app I use (Alien Blue) has such a mode, which is great because I always read HN&Reddit in bed.
Please consider adding a screenshot of the iPhone Comments view to either your site or the App Store listing. The Comments interface would be the deciding factor for me - I still haven't found a HN app that gets this right.
The comments UI is the deciding factor for me as well. So far, the best implementation of this I have come across is cheeaun's Hacker News mobile web app: http://cheeaun.github.com/hnmobile/landing/
I'd also like to request this, comments are a big factor of HN for me. I'll definitely be buying either way it's a lot nicer interface than a few I've seen.
A couple UX suggestions for you.
1. Display the price on the landing page
2. Have the logo at the top clickable to the app store. That's where I clicked first, and didn't get what I expected
I use news:yc too and I miss the collapsed comments. It was way easier to skip over irrelevant discussion threads when you can browse just top level comments.
For my next project I will make an app to interface with your app and I will call it HackerDo.me so that you can get a slick interface to your interface of really important discussions and news on make money.
Cool app. Excited for when it can leave comments and votes!
Looks like your Path menu at the bottom of articles isn't great when you spam it - I can frequently get just the Instapaper icon to show up if I press it rapidly.
For me the comments are most valuable. That's why I'm linking and sharing them always (via Twitter). Is there this option where I can share the comment link via Twitter?
I tweet the link itself(i.e http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4047264). I just post them on Twitter. But this is difficult when you are using mobile apps. To solve that I'm doing this steps(for iPhone):
1.) Copy link of the comment
2.) Open it with safari
3.) Share it with Safari's "Tweet" button
Kudos for putting effort into a personal project but...
It makes me cringe that you clearly used several open source projects (levey's AwesomeMenu[1] comes to mind immediately, and potentially CLCascade[2]) without attribution.
Good design does not necessarily correlate to fancy javascript animations and cascading whatevers. In my opinion, good design is supposed to facilitate the use of the tool, period. What additional design could be applied to http://news.ycombinator.com that would make the user experience better while keeping in mind the objective of popularizing the highest voted stories and fostering the community through comments on stories?
I do not want animations. As you said, design is how something works. I want a readable font. I want modern HTML that adapts to different devices and screens. I want links that don’t expire after I left the page open for half an hour and then fail with stupid errors. I want a website that doesn’t randomly stalls for ten seconds. This is basically just what all these clients do.
All these 3rd party clients are brittle hacks that scrape the HTML because there is no API or RSS feed. This is bad design, not the lack of animations.
To you it's a negative, to me it's an absolute positive.
I can load HN from any device and can pretty much count on it loading quickly and rendering correctly.
If you have an iPhone, I can see why you would want an app, however. I don't see how people browse comfortably on that device without word wrap.
On a related note, I wish the Android browser had a feature to override HTML tags that prevent you from zooming in on mobile sites. One of the nice things about HTC Sense is that it ignores these tags all together.
I'm perhaps biased in this case, but I would consider that to be bad form.