news-yc

I scrape inside the app using a combination of libxml2, a custom XML wrapper for iOS, and then a horribly ugly (but pretty adaptable) chunk of objective-c to parse out the contents. This helps mostly for rate limiting issues: each device is rate limited as it should be.

I don't use the iHackerNews API for news:yc. It seemed too unreliable to use a third party service that seemed to keep having issues, and I didn't want user data to go through a third party. But I think it's cool to easily create a HN app without rewriting the scraping.

I didn't even realize there was a contest until this morning, but I merged in qhoxie's pull request to news:yc (listed as "iPhone App" in the voting options) yesterday, and I have to say, it works quite well.

I'm in the process of submitting a build of news:yc with the search support to the App Store now, so look for it in a week or two. Thanks again qhoxie for the patch!

Or, by "id"? I looked, but I wasn't able to figure out, for example, how I'd get pg's top-level comment here from the id "2619846". I was able to find it with this search, but it requires a second-part to the "_id" that I don't know where to find: http://api.thriftdb.com/api.hnsearch.com/items/_search?q=... (Trying to filter for "id" instead of "_id" throws an error, for some reason.)

That's actually the full app. news:yc is open source, and I want anyone to be able to use it, even if they don't want to (or can't) pay. Since building the app yourself isn't always easy (or possible), I submitted it there so anyone could install it easily.

It's on the todo list for 1.1, the relevant issue is here[0] if you want to follow the progress.

[0]: https://github.com/newsyc/newsyc/issues/17

Yeah, I've seen that too. I really don't know what causes it, but I'm definitely going to investigate for the next release.

I only added the most basic sharing option — copying the link — for 1.0, since it works for everything. But, I'll definitely look into more sharing options for the future, Facebook and Twitter would probably be at the top of those lists.

I was thinking about something similar to this, more like the swipe-for-options menu in Twitter for iPhone, and showing the same toolbar that you get on the details page.

I also really like the idea of double tapping -- maybe (instead of Instapaper) for the article directly, as a shortcut to avoid loading the comments if that's not what you want.

No, it's true, but iOS 4 has been out for almost a year, and is available for almost all devices (and required on the iPhone 4 and newer). I think the downvotes might be because it's just not important information anymore, almost everyone is on iOS 4.0 or later.

I actually added that after most of the price discussion (which now seems to have been voted to the bottom of the thread). I would really like to be able to say "pay as much as you want", but unfortunately the App Store doesn't support that. Overall, my goal is not to make a ton of money here. I just want to make as much as people want to give me, with other ways to get it if I don't.

(Again, though, I'm new to this: I'll definitely take your advice for the future, if I do another "open source but paid" app.)

The HN website works on a phone... but it's hardly where you would want to read it. If you are trying to read the comments, once you're zoomed out enough to see the whole width, the font is usually too tiny to read. And then, to vote on one, you have little tiny buttons that even at the max zoom levels are hard to tap (I've seen quite a few comments apologizing for tapping the wrong arrow on the iPhone).

Now, a platform-neutral website can do what news:yc does too: http://ihackernews.com/ is a good one. But, for the same reason that Twitter clients are popular, some people just like to have one that's built native for their platform.

The value is in an interface for HN that actually makes sense for an iPhone: no tiny voting arrows that don't work with fingers, no comment box that you need to scroll back and forth to see what you're typing, comments that fit the screen's width at a hopefully-readable font size.

Maybe it isn't worth five bucks, that's just where I decided to try out pricing to start. But I did try and make it as easy as possible to use if you don't want to pay: it's free if you build it yourself. (I even submitted it to the pirate sites so those without a dev certificate can install it too.)

Edit, iPad version: I am planning on making one, but Hacker News is usable as it is on the iPad in the browser, there's much less of an advantage for a native client.

Ah, okay, that makes sense. I only use a tiny part of it, just a category for URL parameter parsing (it was the best one I could find online and the license worked out fine): https://github.com/newsyc/newsyc/blob/master/Classes/Categor...

The homepage (linked just under the post, http://newsyc.me/) has there's a few screenshots, and there's also a slightly outdated video (http://vimeo.com/21962215) on Vimeo.

I can't fix it without any help: I want to make something that's a pleasure to use. If you have improvements or even just issues with the choices I've made, could you submit an issue so I can fix them?

Could you elaborate? I've read the entire HIG multiple times. Feel free to post an issue on GitHub if you have any changes that would make it better...

When working on news:yc, I first used a standard, Apple-style, navigation inside tab bar structure. The logic, I guess, is that it allowed access to the tabs anywhere in the app, not only at the top level.

However, when testing the app, I found this was rarely useful in practice, and completely not worth stealing the bottom pixels of the screen where a real toolbar could go. So I switched to Twitter for iPhone style, with the navigation bar as the "top level" element and the tab bar shown only at the root level.

Might not work for all apps, but I think Apple should try to suggest that structure as well, since it does make more sense than their "tab bar always visible" design for at least some apps.

That's a good question, actually. I've never used OpenID so I have no idea what's involved in that, but I'll make a (mental?) note to look into seeing if it works (and probably fixing it) soon.

No Android love, basically, because I don't use Android and this was written (as is often suggested) so scratch a personal itch: Hacker News wasn't fun to browse on my iPhone. Perhaps Google will give out Android devices at I/O and I'll be able to work on a port then.

HP/Palm did send me a Pre 2 development device, though, so I may port it over there if and when I start using webOS for my primary phone.

Sophomore, so I'm 15 right now.

That issue is actually why I went with a distributed approach to news:yc. Yeah, it's a pain: no remote updates (App Store restrictions) and a lengthy review process for each change needed (do you know about how often the markup changes, btw?), but I don't have to deal with any caching, rate limiting, or anything else this way.

(Of course, I don't even think you can do anything like that on the web (even JavaScript, cross-domain issues), so your approach is probably required there.)

I agree completely. And, yet, I did exactly that.

Why? I'm not sure. A more logical choice would have been to wait a few days, choose a new title, and then try it again: maybe find something that HN would agree with the first time around. Or maybe I should have finished it completely, released it on the App Store, then posted a link to that. Who knows. But at this point it's too late, so all I can do is apologize for messing with HN like I did, and hope that this contribution offsets it. :(